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AMERICA 
JOINS THE WORLD 

Selections from the 

Speeches and State Papers 

of 

President Wilson 

1914-1918 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION 



"The greatest, most fruitful fact of the Great 
War ivas the coming together of Europe and 
America" — General Smuts. 



ASSOCIATION PRESS 

New York: 347 Madiison Avb39tte 



^ 






Copyright, 1919, 

BY 
A. O. LOVEJOY 



a e 
' •• • 



FEB -4 SS;3 

^CI.A51U837 



TO 

THE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS OF THE 

UNITED STATES 

who have served in the Great War, this little 
book is dedicated, 

that they may keep in remembrance 
the great objects for which they 
have served; 

that they may see clearly what their 
service has accomplished for 
their country and the world; 

that they may gain a fresh realiza- 
tion of what this Republic 
means, and may yet mean, to 
mankind; and 

that they may thus carry with them, 
as they go back to the tasks of 
peace, a renewed sense of the 
grave and splendid privilege of 
American citizenship. 



CONTENTS PAGE 

IlSTTRODUCTiON 5 

I. Nations Must Keep Their Con- 
tracts 26 

(March 5, 1914) 

II. Neutrals Have Rights 29 

(First Lusitania Note, May 13, 
1915) 

III . No Abatement of Right . ; 32 

(February 24, 1916) 

IV. A League of Nations 35 

(May 27, 1916) 

V. Reasons for America's Entrance 

Into the War 41 

(April 2, 1917) 
VI . Why America Was Kept United ... 54 
(June 5, 1917) 

VII. Flag Day Address '. 58 

(June 14, 1917) 

VIII . The Final Test of an American .... 65 
(November 12, 1917) 

IX . Peace Terms of the United States . . 69 
(January 8, 1918) 

X. To Complete the Work of Wash- 
ington . 80 

(July 4, 1918) 

XI . The Issues of the War S5 

(September 27, 1918) 

XII . The Meaning of the Victory Won . . 89 
(November 11, 1918) 

XIII . The Mandate of Hltvianity 96 

(December 30, 1918) 

4 



INTRODUCTION 

As these words are written, the bells are pealing and 
the whistles blowing to celebrate the coming of peace. 
It may, therefore, seem a strange time to publish a 
collection of utterances setting forth the aims of America 
in the War. Yet, in truth, the speeches and letters in 
this little book are scarcely less timely now than when 
they were first given to the world. For a war is not 
like a boys' game, the whole purpose of which is accom- 
plished when the victory is won. The things that 
brave men have died in battle to win will need to be 
conserved by the less costly loyalty of other men 
through the long days of peace that we hope will follow; 
and that they may not forget how precious those things 
are, men will wish to see them again with the eyes of 
the generation that fought and sacrificed for them, will 
seek to renew in themselves the ideals and to catch once 
more the spirit of the heroic age in which it has been 
our privilege to live. And even at this moment of the 
war's ending, it is well that all who have had a part 
in gaining the victory should remind themselves of the 
greater objects for which they have been striving — 
objects sometimes lost to sight in the stress of the con- 
flict — and should ask themselves what yet remains to 
be done in order that those objects may be fully accom- 
plished and that the War may bring to mankind bene- 
fits worthy of the immeasurable sacrifices which it has 
demanded. For, great as is the goal already reached, 
it marks the completion of but the first half of a single 
task. 

Here, then, are brought together the principal writ- 
ings and discourses in which the spokesman and chief 
magistrate of the American democracy during the 



Great War interpreted the meaning of that war to his 
countrymen. Ihe volume contains a part of the 
record of the progressive rediscovery of America by 
itself, which was followed (as a French writer has said) 
by a second discovery of America by Europe. The 
conception of America's duty and opportunity, of its 
meaning and vocation in the world, which the President , 
and the country under his leadership, had reached at 
the end of four years of the European War, was not the 
same as that which they held at the beginning, though 
it grew naturally out of principles to which the country 
had long been committed. It is the purpose of these 
introductory paragraphs to call the reader's attention 
to the phases of this progress, and to point out some- 
thing of the natural logic by which those phases de- 
veloped one out of another. 

People in France and England and Belgium have 
sometimes been puzzled to understand how it was pos- 
sible that so many Americans, President Wilson seem- 
ingly among them, should have taken more than two 
years to realize that this war was, from the first, one 
in which America had as deep a concern as any other 
nation. It is important that American soldiers and 
others who talk with our Allies about these matters 
should help them to understand what it was that held 
us back so long. There were three chief reasons for 
our delay. The first was the fact that, during the 
earlier months of the War, the full realization of the 
spirit and purposes of the German government, and of 
the methods of its warfare and its diplomacy, had not 
been brought home to us. Some of the most monstrous 
of its crimes had already been committed; but the 
stories of such things seemed to many to be too bad 
to be true, and the evidence for them was not yet what 
it was presently to become — complete and overwhelm- 

6 



ing. A second reason for staying out of the conflict— 
a reason which clearly had especial weight with Presi- 
dent Wilson — was the feeling that America could best 
serve mankind by keeping its spirit calm and unembit- 
tered, and by avoiding offense to either side, so that 
our Government might, when the time came, be the 
better able to serve as a friendly mediator between the 
warring European peoples. It was in this way, so it 
for a time seemed to President Wilson, that America 
could best "keep herself fit and free to do what is 
honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the 
peace of the world. " 

But there was a third cause of our holding aloof 
•which was more important than either of these two 
which have been mentioned; and it is one which peo- 
ple in Europe usually do not realize. This cause was 
the influence of the long-accepted idea that the first 
rule of the foreign policy of the United States should 
be to refrain from meddling in the quarrels of the coun- 
tries of the Old World. This idea, which has been called 
"the tradition of American isolation," owed much of 
its influence to the fact that it was supposed to have 
behind it the authority of George Washington. In his 
Farewell Address in 1796, Washington warned the 
people of this country against "entangling our peace 
and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rival- 
ship, interest, humor, or caprice." "Europe," he de- 
clared, "has a set of primary interests which to us have 
none, or a very remote, relation. Hence, she must be 
engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which 
are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, there- 
fore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by 
artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, 
or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friend- 
ships or enmities." President Washington's warning 

7 



did not, in reality, have the meaning which it has often 
been supposed to have. He was advising only against 
"permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign 
world"; and his advice was addressed to a young and 
little country, threatened by many dangers. It has, 
however, long been customary to quote the first presi- 
dent as opposed to all "entangling alliances" and to 
every form of intervention in Europe's affairs. 

But it was not only to the great name of Washington 
that this "tradition of isolation" owed its strength. It 
expressed also a certain natural way of thinking about 
the kind of service which America was meant to render 
to mankind. To many good Americans it for a long 
time seemed that the New World could fulfil its own 
destiny only by keeping itself untroubled by the ancient 
controversies and untouched by the ancient corruptions 
of less fortunate lands. America, many have felt, rep- 
resents a new era in human history, a more wholesome, 
more happy, more humane chapter in the records of 
men's living together upon the earth. To the people 
of the older countries it was to be a haven of refuge 
in which they might be assured of escape from despot- 
ism and from the wars and the disorders which despot- 
isms breed. It therefore must stand outside the circle 
of the rivalries and even of the friendships of the Euro- 
pean nations, must build up its own civilization undis- 
tracted by the incessant wranglings of the quarrelsome 
continent across the Atlantic. 

What most Europeans fail to understand is the 
strength of the hold which this way of thinking long 
had upon the minds of most Americans. But without 
understanding this, it is impossible for anyone to ap- 
preciate how hard it was for America to see that it was 
really concerned in an European war; how truly Presi- 
dent Wilson's speech of April 2, 1917, opened a new 



chapter in the history of the United States and of the 
world; and how astonishing a thing it was, from the 
older American point of view, that American boys 
should be fighting on the ancient battlefields of France 
and Flanders, and that an American president, in con- 
junction with the leaders of the free nations of Europe, 
should be bidding Old V>'orld emperors surrender their 
rule over the lands they had misgoverned. 

But during the years from 1914 to 1917 the President 
and the country gradually came to see that America 
could not, either with honor or with safety, continue 
to live apart, an irresponsible if not an indifferent spec- 
tator of the Old World's tragedy. And the German 
government spared no pains to perfect the education 
of the American people in this matter. Month after 
month they drove the lesson home. They showed us 
that our supposed isolation was an illusion. At a time 
when our people still wished earnestly to keep out of 
the European conflict, Germany brought the conflict 
to our doors, using our territory as a base of operations 
for acts of war, or for illegal and often murderous in- 
trigues, against neighbors with whom w^e were at peace, 
and against our own citizens. Our political vision 
might be limited to the Western hemisphere, but Ger- 
many's plans and machinations knew no corresponding 
limits; they took in the whole world, and dragged the 
whole world into a general maelstrom of evil. Above 
all, the German government made certain that Ameri- 
cans should realize that any great modern nation has 
interests which reach far beyond its o^ti boundaries; 
that, besides its exclusive ownership of certain terri- 
tory, it has a joint ownership in the common highway 
of all nations, the sea, so that its elementary and 
essential rights can be invaded as truly upon the high 
seas as upon its own soil. We saw American citizens. 



"acting within their indisputable rights in taking their 
ships and traveling wherever their legitimate business 
called them," deliberately done to death by the agents 
of the German government, in defiance of clear and 
recognized principles of international law. And so the 
tradition of American isolation went down with the 
pitiful victims of the "Lusitania," the "Sussex," the 
"Laconia," and the "Vigilancia." 

Nevertheless, the influence of that tradition had been 
strong enough to prevent the United States from going 
to war until after Germany had thus repeatedly com- 
mitted acts of war against the United States, and had 
made immistakable her determination to persist in 
such acts. Whatever the President's personal judg- 
ment on this matter may have been, the temper of the 
country, as it seemed, was not ripe for war until it 
became clear that the only alternative was abject sub- 
mission to German aggression. Of this fact few Amer- 
icans, probably, are now proud. If Germany's "overt 
acts" of February and March, 1917, had never been 
committed — if, indeed, the "unrestricted" submarine 
campaign had never been begun — there would still have 
been overwhelming reasons why we should have taken 
our place beside France and England, Belgium and 
Italy and their Allies, in saving the world from Prussian 
domination. But those reasons did not become fully 
plain to the American people until war had been forced 
upon us over an issue in which our own rights and 
honor and security were more directly and evidently 
involved. 

Yet there is one thing which it is important to note 
in nearly all President Wilson's utterances before 1917 
concerning Germany's violations of American rights at 
sea. From the first he saw in these crimes not simply 
an affront to America's honor and an injury to Amer- 

10 



ica's interests, but a still graver thing — an affront 
against the laAV of nations and an injury to one of the 
most fundamental interests of all peoples. Acquies- 
cence in Germany's wrongdoing against the United 
States, he wrote to Senator Stone, (page 33) "would be 
an implicit, all but an explicit, acquiescence in the 
violation of the rights of mankind everywhere, and of 
whatever nation or allegiance. It would be a deliber- 
ate abdication of our hitherto proud position as spokes- 
man, even amid the turmoil of war, for the law and the 
right." Let expediency take the place of principle in 
one such instance, "and the whole fine fabric of inter- 
national law might crumble under our hands piece by 
piece." Upon maintaining the integrity of this fabric, 
the President saw, depends in the long run the good 
order and security of the entire v/orld; and it was 
always as a part of this universal interest of mankind, 
and not as a thing separate and peculiar, that he looked 
upon the maintenance of the rights of American sea- 
men, travelers, and shipmasters. The L'nited States, 
he repeatedly wrote, sought nothing for itself but 
what it wished "to share with all free peoples." Thus 
our controversy with Germany over her methods of 
submarine war was a test case for a larger issue; and 
throughout the controversy Mr. Wilson kept that 
larger issue steadily in view. When, therefore, war 
finally came, it came as a war, not over the submarine 
question, but over the question whether respect for the 
law of nations, the rights of peoples, and the public 
order of the world, was to be enforced in the present 
instance, and permanently assured for the future. As 
the President said in September, 1918, with the Avmer- 
ican people "national purposes have fallen more and 
more into the background, and the common purpose 
of enlightened mankind has taken their place." 

11 



If one were to try to sum up in a single phrase the 
pith of the discovery which brought America out of its 
old isolation and into the war, it perhaps could be de- 
scribed best as the discovery of the "priority of the 
international problem." We found that there is a cer- 
tain order in which reforms have to be taken up — and 
that we had been taking them up without sufficient 
regard to this order. We in America had been im- 
mensely busy developing the country and trying to 
improve conditions within our own borders. Many 
people of "forward-looking minds," here as elsewhere, 
had caught a vision of a better way in which human 
beings might live and work together, of a larger meas- 
ure of "social justice" between man and man. And so 
absorbed were we in these tasks that most of us failed 
to see that none of the gains which we might make at 
home, none of the reforms which we might accomplish, 
were secure against sudden destruction, so long as 
there were no guarantees of order and of justice between 
nation and nation. So interdependent had civilized 
countries become in modern times that — as the events 
of 1914 showed — a single people, filled with ambition 
and national vanity, might in a moment set the whole 
world afire, undo the results of the labors of many gen- 
erations, and almost bring the entire structure of civili- 
zation to ruin. Here, then, we came to realize, is a 
situation which we must put an end to, before we can 
go on with our efforts to make human life h,ere in 
America finer and happier, and the dealings of our own 
people with one another more just, more law-abiding 
and more fraternal. Otherwise, we should be as those 
who pour water into a sieve. 

Thus it was that the people which had, perhaps, been 
the least "international-minded" of all great modern 
peoples, made ready to devote its manhood and its 

12 



resources "without stint or limit" to an essentially in- 
ternational object — to no less an object than the set- 
tlement upon a just and lasting basis of the general 
problem of international relations. "What we demand 
in this war," the President said, "is that the world be 
.made fit and safe to live in, and in particular that it 
be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like 
our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own 
institutions, be assured of justice and fair-dealing by 
the other nations of the world." "We can," in the 
words of yet another address, "in no circumstances 
consent to live in a world governed by intrigue and 
force. We believe that our own desire for a new inter- 
national order under which reason and justice and the 
common interests of mankind shall prevail is the desire 
of enlightened men everywhere. Without that new 
order the world will be without peace and human life 
will lack tolerable conditions of existence and developH 
ment. Having set our hand to Ihe task of achieving 
it, we shall not turn back." 

What, broadly, was required for the establishment 
of this new international order was clear. It meant 
that we must bring it about that hereafter "the same 
standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong 
done shall be observed among nations and their gov- 
ernments that are observed among the individual citi- 
zens of civilized states." But in civilized states indi- 
viduals live an organized community life. And we all 
know very well what minimum conditions must be ful- 
filled in order that a community of individuals may be 
safe, orderly, fit for rational beings to live in. There 
must be recognized laws, binding upon all the members 
of the community; there must be recognized rights 
belonging to the individual members; there must be 
respect for contracts voluntarily entered into; and 

13 



above all, the enforcement of laws, of rights, and of 
contracts, must not be a casual and private matter, 
left to the individuals who, in any given case, may be 
immediately concerned, but must have behind it the 
entire organized force of the community. There must 
be machinery for punishing members who seek their 
own interest at the expense of the interest of the com- 
munity and in defiance of its laws; in other words, the 
community must see to it that violence and dishonesty 
and all forms of lawlessness are made exceedingly un- 
profitable to any who may be rash enough to engage 
in them — since experience unhappily shows that so 
long as they are profitable some men will continue to 
practice them. Finally, in any tolerable community 
life there must be something more than all these things; 
there must, namely, be a community spirit, a prevalent 
habit of good will, born of the experience of working 
together at common tasks and for common ends. 

The chief purpose of the United States in the war, 
then — as President Wilson has again and again set forth 
— has been to cooperate in getting realized among inde- 
pendent states these familiar conditions of a decent and 
endurable community life. And this funda.mental pur- 
pose implied five very definite and practical conse- 
quences. 

1. It meant, in the first place, that no outcome of 
the war short of an absolute and unmistakable defeat 
of the Central Empires could be tolerated by the United 
States. Germany and her allies had consistently acted 
upon the belief that the way to national greatness and 
prosperity lies through the breaking of treaties, per- 
petual intrigue against other nations, habitual violation 
of international law, and complete disregard of all con- 
siderations of humanity. The first thing needful then — 
if America's purpose was to be realized — was to prove 

14 



beyond a peradventure that this spirit and these 
methods are as ruinous to a state as their counterparts 
in ordinary social life are ruinous to the individuals 
who resort to them. Those who looked upon the war 
as a mere conflict of national interests and ambitions 
might perhaps be ready, when things were not going 
well, to end the terrible struggle by some process of 
give-and-take. But America's aim implied from the 
first that "no peace can be obtained by any kind of 
bargain or compromise with the Central Empires, . . , 
or by any abatement of the principles we have avowed as 
the principles for which we are fighting." The neces- 
sary first step towards the introduction of a new age 
of international order and justice must be a demonstra- 
tion by example — by so great and unmistakable an 
example that coming generations of men can never for- 
get it — that not even the most powerful of nations has 
more power than the law, and that violation of the 
rights even of little peoples is an eminently unprofitable 
enterprise even for the greatest. For with nations as 
with individuals it is true that, so long as violence and 
lawlessness are profitable, some are likely to continue 
to practice them. 

2. This object, moreover, required more than repa- 
ration by Germany for all the destruction she has 
wrought in Belgium and France and upon the sea, and 
the restoration of all the territory and property she has 
stolen diu-ing the present war. The process of restitu- 
tion must begin farther back. For perhaps the chief 
cause of this war was the fact that Germany had, 
more than once within a half-century, found enormous 
profit in bad faith and intrigue and aggression. She 
had been the bandit state in Europe, and she had 
found that banditry paid. Her recent prosperity was 
based largely upon the indemnity she had exacted, 

IS 



and upon the mineral deposits of the territory of which 
she had robbed France, in 1871. These older gains of 
her evil-doing, as well as the more recent, must be 
taken from her. The question of Alsace-Lorraine con- 
cerned the United States as well as France — not sim- 
ply because of the old friendship between the two re- 
publics, nor solely because of France's service to Amer- 
ica during oiu' struggle for independence — but, above 
all, because the international objects we had set before 
ourselves in this war could not be realized so long as 
Germany profited and France suffered by the great 
wrong done less than fifty years ago. 

3. But America's aim in the war implied something 
yet more sweeping; it required nothing less than a literal 
"remodeling of the map of Europe." For the new inter- 
national order, if it was to assure justice in the future, 
could not begin by ignoring the long-standing and still 
flagrant injustices of the present European situation. 
Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Turkey held in sub- 
jection to their alien and oppressive rule a number of 
highly gifted peoples, capable of self-government and 
passionately eager for independence and for the free 
development of their national life. With the aspirations 
of these peoples for freedom, our own history and tradi- 
tions would under any circumstances have made us 
deeply sympathetic; yet it is probably true that we 
should not have crossed the ocean to fight for the in- 
dependence of the Czecho-Slovaks or the Poles or the 
Jugo-Slavs, imless we had come to see each of these 
separate struggles for liberty in the light of its relation 
to the general problem of international order and 
security and fair-dealing. But when we once set our- 
selves to deal with that problem, it became very clear 
that it could never be solved so long as these old op- 
pressions were not ended. A plaH for preventing future 

16 



wars would have little prospect of succeeding, and 
would as little deserve to succeed, if it attempted 
merely to perpetuate the existing state of things in 
Europe and Western Asia, with all its iniquities un- 
rectified. Thus the war which America entered first of 
all for the vindication of law and the establishment of 
lasting peace and security between nations, became also 
a War of European Liberation. That day of January 
8, 1918, when President Wilson first publicly pro- 
claimed America's recognition of the relation between 
her fundamental purpose in the War and the claims of 
the submerged and oppressed nationalities of Europe, 
and declared that the American people were ready "to 
devote their lives, their honor, and everything they 
possess" to the support of those claims, was a very great 
day in modern history. More plainly even than those 
memorable days of April of the preceding year, it made 
evident what far-reaching consequences must follow the 
cooperation of the great Republic of the New World in 
the solution of the difficulties of the Old. It was a fit 
beginning for what was to prove the Year of Victory. 

4. The three special aims thus far mentioned, 
though involved in the fundamental purpose with which 
America entered the War, had already been made their 
own by the European Allies, and had been powerfully 
expressed by their representative statesmen. But 
there is, in this "war of ideas," a fourth idea which was 
introduced into it chicx^y by President Wilson — the idea 
of democracy. About the relation of this to the primary 
object of the War, as conceived by Mr. Wilson, there 
has been a good deal of misunderstanding. 

Many have supposed that the destruction of auto- 
cratic government in general, and of the German variety 
of it, in particular, was itself the primary object of 
America's effort. The War has sometimes been rep- 

17 



resented as a sort of crusade for the diffusion of the 
democratic faith and the estabhshment of repubhcan 
institutions in countries which did not yet possess them. 
Yet this interpretation of our purpose has more than 
once been repudiated by President Wilson. "We in- 
tend," he declared to Congress in his Annual Message 
of 1917, "no interference with the internal affairs of 
the German Empire." Such interference "we should 
deem absolutely unjustifiable, absolutely contrary to 
the principles we have professed to live by and to hold 
most sacred throughout our life as a nation." So 
again in the speech 'on peace terms (January 8, 1918), 
the President said: "We do not presume to suggest to 
Germany any alteration or modification of her in- 
stitutions." 

It is nevertheless true that Mr. Wilson, more than 
any other leader in the warring nations, has taught 
his countrymen, and, indeed, all mankind, to look upon 
the war as a fight to the finish between democracy and 
the last great autocracy in Europe; has made it a con- 
stant object of his policy to bring about the overthrow 
of the imperial regime in Germany; and has now seen 
this policy crowned with success. How are these 
facts to be reconciled with his protestations of un- 
willingness to dictate to the German people with respect 
to the character of their domestic institutions.'^ 

The answer can be seen only when it is understood 
that, for the President, the issue of democracy has 
entered into the War only in so far as it is related to the 
one fundamental purpose upon which he has so often 
insisted — the establishment of international justice and 
of lasting peace. Not because we wished to impose 
free government upon peoples contented with their 
chains, but because a great and powerful and ambitious 
people so contented was a perpetual menace to the 

IS 



free governments of other nations, has it been our policy 
so to shape the situation that the Germans themselves 
would rise against their rulers. Not to make the world 
democratic, but at least to "make the world safe for 
democracy," has been our war-program. And the 
existing German imperial system was in two ways, as it 
seemed to Mr. Wilson, an obstacle to the realization 
of that program. In the first place, the individuals 
controlling it had again and again shown that they 
had no conception of the meaning of good faith. They 
were literally "incapable of a covenanted peace." 
"The word of the present rulers of Germany" could not 
be accepted "as a guarantee of anything that is to 
endure." But the obstacle to a secure peace seemed to 
the President to lie even 'more in the nature of the 
system than in the character of these individuals. 
"A steadfast concert for peace," he contended in a 
famous passage of the Second of April Speech, "can 
never be maintained except by a partnership of demo- 
cratic nations. No autocratic government could be 
trusted to keep faith within it or to observe its cove- 
nants . . . Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the 
plottings of inner circles who could plan what they 
would and render account to no one would be a cor- 
ruption seated at its very heart. Only free peoples can 
hold their purpose and their honor steady to a common 
end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow 
interest of their own." 

It was thus indirectly — though not on that account 
less essentially — that the overthrow of autocracy be- 
came one of the objects of the War. And it was also, 
as the President viewed it, an object to be attained only 
indirectly. Since we desired this consummation, yet 
were unwilling to achieve it by imposing a form of 
government upon the Germans by force of arms, all 

19 



that we and our Allies could legitimately do was to 
call upon the German people to choose which of 
two futures they preferred. They could, if they 
wished, cling to their old leaders and to their auto- 
cratic system. But if they did so, they must plainly 
understand that the peace treaty to be made with them 
must be guaranteed, not by the word of their rulers, 
but by their absolute and lasting powerlessness to 
break it; and they must likewise understand that, so 
long as they chose "to live under ambitious and 
intriguing masters whom the other peoples of the world 
couid not trust, it might be impossible to admit them 
to the partnership of nations which must henceforth 
guarantee the world's peace, ... or to the free 
economic intercourse whi»h must inevitably spring 
out of the other partnerships of a real peace." To force 
the German people to face this alternative, and to make 
its own option — this from the beginning has clearly 
been one of the foremost objects of President Wilson's 
diplomacy. To make it certain that the Germans would 
choose the right alternative, the defeat of their military 
power was — as the President never failed to recognize 
— absolutely necessary. But it is at least questionable 
whether a military defeat would have been sufficient 
to assure that choice, if it had not been accompanied by 
Mr. Wilson's constant pressing home upon the German 
mind of the inevitableness of this option. 

5. Yet the fom- great results already mentioned are, 
after all, no more than necessary preliminaries to the 
accomplishment of America's chief piu'pose in the War. 
They do not, of themselves, fulfil that purpose; for 
they afford no permanent assurance against future 
acts of violence and injustice by one nation against 
another. They set up no organized and lasting Com- 
munity of Nations in which are realized those conditions 

20 



which we have seen to be indispensable for a sane and 
secure community of individuals. And, from the Am- 
erican point of view — which is but the point of view 
of all humane and reasonable men — the war will have 
been a tragic failure unless through it "some common 
force shall be brought into existence which shall safe- 
guard right as the first and most fundamental interest 
of all peoples and all governments," and shall "sum- 
mon coercion, not to the service of political ambition 
or selfish hostility, but to the service of a common 
order, a common justice, and a common peace." 
Even before the United States had entered the struggle. 
President Wilson had declared that civilization "can 
not claim to be finally established" until "the great 
nations of the world have reached some sort of agree- 
ment as to what they hold to be fundamental in their 
common interest, and as to some feasible method of 
action in concert when 9.ny nation or group of nations 
seeks to disturb those fundamental things." And it 
was to make the world thus, at last, a civilized world 
that America finally took up arms. The same theme 
has constantly recurred in the President's most im- 
portant utterances on our war aims. "This war," he 
pointed out (February 11, 1918), "had its roots in the 
disregard of the rights of small nations and of national- 
ities which lacked the union and the force to make good 
their claim to determine their own allegiances and their 
own forms of political life. Covenants must now be 
entered into which will render such things impossible 
for the future: and those covenants must be backed by 
the united force of all the nations that love justice and 
are willing to maintain it at any cost." 

It is true that the organization of a workable and 
enduring League of Nations to enforce peace and main- 
tain international justice is a problem which, in its 

21 



details, o^ers many and serious difficulties. But to 
believe that those difficulties cannot be solved is to 
believe that mankind, even after the fearful teaching 
of the past four — or rather, of the past fifty — years, is 
a race so besotted in folly that it cannot unite even to 
save itself and its dearest interests from the ruin which 
has once already almost befallen them . Few Americans 
are ready to think so despairingly of human nature. 

It will be seen that the purpose of establishing a 
League of Nations, though it does not conMict with the 
purpose of liberating the oppressed nations of Europe, 
nevertheless modifies and counterbalances it. We have 
fought to set those nations free, and in doing so have 
incidentally disunited more than one existing state or 
federation of states; but we have not fought to make 
mankind as a whole more disunited than before, nor to 
set up new walls of separation between neighbor- 
peoples. It would manifestly be not a realization but a 
defeat of our purpose if the war were to result, in 
Eastern Europe or elsewhere, in the growth of fresh 
national rivalries and animosities, or in the develop- 
ment among other peoples of that spirit of national 
selfishness and truculence which has brought ruin to 
Prussia and disaster to all the world. Especially do we 
hope and expect that the nations which have newly 
won their independence will, from the beginning of the 
splendid history which we hope awaits them, be mindful 
also of the interdependence of nations, and will be 
conspicuous champions of those ideals of international 
good will and cooperation by which their own national 
existence has been made possible. 

From all this it is evident how truly the objects for 
the sake of which America has been fighting still wait, 
for their full accomplishment, upon tasks yet to be 

22 



performed. But for what still remains to be done we 
can legitimately gain courage and confidence by re- 
membering how much we have learned and how far we 
have gone in the little space of two years, and how much 
finer and greater than we had guessed is the destiny 
and opportunity of the Republic, as these years have 
revealed it to us. For upon all the past history of 
America, upon all the labors and struggles of those who 
have gone before us, the present moment casts a new 
and splendid light. As President Wilson wrote, in 
proclaiming a national holiday on the anniversary of 
the discovery of the New World, "we now know more 
certainly than we ever knew before why free men 
brought the great nation and government we love into 
existence, because it grows clearer and clearer what 
supreme service it is to be America's privilege to render 
to the world." W^e have, indeed, at last discovered 
that the Western Continent was not to be a mere 
receptacle for the overflow of Europe's population, nor 
even a mere haven of refuge from ancient oppressions, 
made safe by its remoteness. It was, in the fullness of 
time, to assume its due share in the task of keeping the 
whole world safe — to have its part, an indispensable 
part, in redeeming the Mother Continent from the 
menace of a new and peculiarly sinister oppression, and 
in helping, in very truth, "to proclaim liberty through- 
out the world." America's sons, sprung from every 
race and breed in Europe and inheriting all that the 
older lands have wrought for the enrichment of human 
life, have, through these crowded months of 1918, 
poured across the Atlantic, a huge returning tide of 
youth, to the shores from which their fathers came; 
and in the work which it was given them to do we see 
how, in a larger sense than we had supposed, America 
was the hope of the world. 

23 



Yet we Americans have no reason to assume any 
grand airs of unselfishness or generosity. We have done 
what it would have been ignominy, at such a crisis, 
not to do; and we have always realized that, in Presi- 
dent Wilson's words, "we are but one of the champions 
of the rights of mankind," and that we were not the 
earliest to enter the lists in that cause. Our French and 
British and Italian allies, as we can never forget, have 
paid an immensely greater part than we of the price 
of victory. And if any distinction in honor were to 
be made amongst the peoples which have together saved 
civilization from a supreme disaster, we and all our 
greater Allies know well to which country the first 
place must be given: it is to the little nation which — 
not after long hesitation, but in a moment, and as a 
thing of course — accepted with open eyes the prospect, 
not merely of sacrifice, but of absolute ruin, rather than 
violate its pledged word and become a partner in an 
act of treachery against a neighbor-people. By that 
decision Belgium made itself for all time the symbol and 
the chief representative of the ideal of international 
obligation and national faith; and by its hopeless but 
heroically prolonged resistance to the field-gray hordes 
that swept across its soil, it saved the cause of freedom 
and of international right at the moment of its most 
desperate peril. The action of Belgium in August, 1914, 
was a challenge to the honor of every nation in the 
world. It was unthinkable that America would not, 
sooner or later, meet that challenge. W^e had long 
since been far too deeply committed to the same prin- 
ciples, not to be ready to dedicate all we had to main- 
taining them, so soon as we clearly realized how abso- 
lutely their future influence in the world's affairs de- 
pended upon our making common cause with all their 
other defenders. And now that America has thus 

24 



"joined the world," and the free peoples of both con- 
tinents have been united in a vast fellowship of sacrifice 
for the sake of the generations that are to come after, 
it is unthinkable that the old isolation and estrange- 
ment can ever come back again. We are under the 
most sacred obligation to continue to work together 
loyally in peace to complete the task in which so many 
of our brothers, among all these peoples, have laid 
down their lives together. 

November, 1918. A. O. Lovejoy. 



2S 



I. NATIONS MUST KEEP THEIR 
CONTRACTS 

(Address to Congress, March 5, 1914) 

[This address may seem at first to have little to do with 
the war. In reality it is the most appropriate preamble 
to the President's speeches on the war aims of America. 
Here, five months before Germany invaded Belgium, Mr. 
Wilso7i assumed as evident these principles: that nations 
are bound by the savie code of honor which self-respecting 
men observe in their dealings with one another; that a 
station must therefore carry out the promises which it has 
made, even though it be to its own hurt; and that the fact 
that a country is great and powerful is not a reason for 
disregardijig the claims and rights of other countries, but 
rather a reason for a more scrupulous regard for those 
rights and a more generous recognition of those claims. 
And it was to America that these principles were then 
applied. Three years before President Wilson demanded 
that Germany should "observe the same standards of con- 
duct that are observed among the individual citizens of 
civilized states," he teas demanding that our own country 
shoidd do this, even if our material interests might seem 
to some to suffer thereby. Congress accepted the same 
view and took action accordingly. 

The facts necessary for an understanding of the address 
are briefly these: The Panama Canal had just been com- 
pleted. An act passed by Congress granted passage of 
the canal to American coastwise ships free of tolls. But 
there existed a treaty with Great Britain which many 

26 



American, and probably most foreign, authorities in- 
terpreted as providing that, when the canal should be 
built, no preferential treatment should be given to American 
vessels. It was to call attention to this treaty-obligation 
that the President appeared before a joint session of 
Congress on March 5, 191Jf.] 

Gentlemen of the Congress: 

I have come to you upon an errand which can be very 
briefly performed, but I beg that you will not measure 
its importance by the number of sentences in which I 
state it. No communication I have addressed to the 
Congress carried with it graver or more far-reaching 
implications as to the interest of the country, and I 
come now to speak upon a matter with regard to which 
I am charged in a peculiar degree, by the Constitution 
itself, with personal responsibility. 

I have come to ask you for the repeal of that pro- 
vision of the Panama Canal Act of August 24, 1912, 
which exempts vessels engaged in the coastwise trade 
of the United States from payment of tolls, and to urge 
upon you the justice, the wisdom, and the large policy 
of such a repeal with the utmost earnestness of which 
I am capable. 

In my own judgment, very fully considered and ma- 
turely formed, that exemption constitutes a mistaken 
economic policy from every point of view, and is, 
moreover, in plain contravention of the treaty with 
Great Britain concerning the canal concluded on 
November 18, 1901 . But I have not come to urge upon 
you my personal views. I have come to state to you a 
fact and a situation . Whatever may be our own differ- 

27 



ences of opinion concerning this much debated measure, 
its meaning is not debated outside the United States. 
Everywhere else the language of the treaty is given but 
one interpretation, and that interpretation precludes 
the exemption I am asking you to repeal. We consented 
to the treaty; its language we accepted, if we did not 
originate it; and we are too big, too powerful, too self- 
respecting a nation to interpret with a too strained or 
refined reading the words of our own promises just 
because we have power enough to give us leave to read 
them as we please. The large thing to do is the only 
thing W'e can afford to do, a voluntary withdrawal from 
a position everywhere questioned and misunderstood. 
We ought to reverse our action without raising the 
question whether we were right or wrong, and so once 
more deserve our reputation for generosity and for the 
redemption of every obligation without quibble or 
hesitation. 

I ask this of you in support of the foreign policy of the 
administration . I shall not know how to deal with other 
matters of even greater delicacy and nearer consequence 
if you do not grant it to me in ungrudging measure. 



28 



II. NEUTRALS HAVE RIGHTS 

(First Note to Germany on the Sinking of the 
"Lusitania," May 13, 1915.) 

[On May 7, 1915, the Cunard steamship "Lusitania," 
bound to England from Neiv York, icas torpedoed by a 
German submarine off the coast of Ireland, and sank 
almost immediately, causing the loss of more than 1,000 
lives. Among the victims were 138 Americans. The most 
important passages of President Wilson's note of protest 
to the German Government follow .] 

The Government of the United States has been 
apprised that the Imperial German Government con- 
sidered themselves to be obliged by the extraordinary 
circumstances of the present war and the measures 
adopted by their adversaries in seeking to cut Germany 
off from all commerce, to adopt methods of retaliation 
which go much beyond the ordinary methods of warfare 
at sea, in the proclamation of a war zone from which 
they have warned neutral ships to keep away. This 
Government has already taken occasion to inform the 
Imperial German Government that it cannot admit 
the adoption of such measures or such a warning of 
danger to operate as in any degree an abbreviation of 
the rights of American shipmasters or of American 
citizens bound on lawful errands as passengers on mer- 
chant ships of belligerent nationality; and that it must 
hold the Imperial German Government to a strict 
accountability for any infringement of those rights, 
intentional or incidental. It does not understand the 

29 



Imperial German Government to question those rights. 
It assumes, on the contrary, that the Imperial Gov- 
ernment accept, as of course, the rule that the lives of 
noncombatants, whether they be of neutral citizenship 
or citizens of one of the nations at war, cannot lawfully 
or rightfully be put in jeopardy by the captiu-e or 
destruction of an unarmed merchantman, and recognize 
also, as all other nations do, the obligation to take the 
usual precaution of visit and search to ascertain whether 
a suspected merchantman is in fact of belligerent 
nationality or is in fact carrying contraband of war 
under a neutral flag. . . . 

American citizens act within their indisputable rights 
in taking their ships and in traveling wherever their 
legitimate business calls them upon the high seas, and 
exercise those rights in what should be the well-justified 
confidence that their lives will not be endangered by 
acts done in clear violation of universally acknowledged 
international obligations, and certainly in the con- 
fidence that their own Government will sustain them 
in the exercise of their rights. ... 

The Government and the people of the United States 
look to the Imperial German Government for just, 
prompt, and enlightened action in this vital matter with 
the greater confidence because the United States and 
Germany are bound together not only by special ties of 
friendship but also by the explicit stipulations of the 
treaty of 1828 between the United States and the King- 
dom of Prussia. 

Expressions of regret and offers of reparation in case 
of the destruction of neutral ships sunk by mistake, 
while they may satisfy international obligations, if no 

30 



loss of life results, cannot justify or excuse a practice, 
the natural and necessary effect of which is to subject 
neutral nations and neutral persons to new and im- 
measurable risks. 

The Imperial German Government will not expect 
the Government of the United States to omit any word 
or any act necessary to the performance of its sacred 
duty of maintaining the rights of the United States and 
its citizens and of safeguarding their free exercise and 
enjoyment. 



31 



III. NO ABATEMENT OF RIGHT CAN 
BE ACCEPTED 

(Letter to Senator Stone, February 24, 1916.) 

[During the last week of February, 1916, there were 
introduced in both houses of Congress resolutions calling 
upon citizenb of the United States "to forbear to exercise 
the right to travel as passengers on any armed vessel of 
any belligerent pouter, ivhether such vessel be armed for 
offensive or defensive purposes." On February 2^., 
Senator W . J . Stone of Missouri, Chairman of the Senate 
Committee on Foreign Affairs, addressed an open letter 
to the President, supporting this resolution and declaring 
that it would be "so monstrous as to be indefensible" that 
the United States should be "plunged into the vortex of 
this ivorld war" in defense of the right of its citizens to 
travel in safety on the high seas — a right unquestioned 
under international laio. President Wilson replied on 
ike same day in the follounng terms:] 

You are right in assuming that I shall do everything 
in my power to keep the United States out of war. I 
think the country will feel no uneasiness about my 
course in that respect. Through many anxious months 
I ha e striven for that object, amidst difficulties more 
manifold than can have been apparent upon the surface, 
and so far I have succeeded. I do not doubt that I shall 
continue to succeed. The course which the Central 
European Powers have announced their intention of 
following in the future with regard to undersea warfare 
seems for the moment to threaten insuperable ob- 

32 



stacles, but its apparent meaning is so manifestly 
inconsistent with explicit assurances recently given us 
by those Powers with regard to their treatment of the 
merchant vessels on the high seas that I must believe 
that explanations will presently ensue which will put 
a different aspect upon it. We have had no reason to 
question their good faith or their fidelity to their 
promises in the past, and I for one feel confident that 
we shall have none in the future. 

But in any event our duty is clear. No nation, no 
group of nations, has the right while war is in progress 
to alter or disregard the principles which all nations 
have agreed upon in mitigation of the horrors and suffer- 
ings of war; and if the clear rights of American citizens 
should ever unhappily be abridged or denied by any 
such action we should, it seems to me, have in honor 
no choice as to what our own course should be. 

For my own part, I cannot consent to any abridg- 
ment of the rights of American citizens in any respect. 
The honor and self-respect of the nation are involved. 
We covet peace, and shall preserve it at any cost but 
the loss of honor. To forbid our people to exercise their 
rights for fear we might be called upon to vindicate 
them would be a deep humiliation indeed. It would be 
an implicit, all but an explicit, acquiescence in the viola- 
tion of the rights of mankind everywhere, and of what- 
ever nation or allegiance. It would be a deliberate 
abdication of our hitherto proud position as spokesman, 
even amidst the turmoil of war, for the law and the 
right. It would make everything this Government has 
attempted, and everything that it has achieved during 
this terrible struggle of nations, meaningless and futile. 

33 



It is important to reflect that if in this instance we 
allow expediency to take the place of principle, the door 
would inevitably be opened to still further concessions . 
Once accept a single abatement of right, and many other 
humiliations would certainly follow, and the whole fine 
fabric of international law might crumble under our 
hands piece by piece. What we are contending for in 
this matter is of the very essence of the things that have 
made America a sovereign nation. She cannot yield 
them without conceding her own impotency as a nation, 
and making a virtual surrender of her independent 
position among the nations of the world. 



34 



IV. A LEAGUE OF NATIONS 

(Address Before the League to Enforce Peace, 
Wa-Shington, May 27, 1916.) 

[The organization known as The League to Enforce 
Peace was formed at a meeting held on June 16, 1915, in 
Independence Hall, Philadelphia. It was felt by the 
organizers of the society that there could be no other place 
so suitable for a "meeting called to frame a Declaration of 
Interdependence of the Nations." The League favors 
(1) the maintenance of international courts to u'hich 
shall be submitted for hearing and judgment all inter- 
national disputes involving questions of law or treaties; 
{2) the establishment of international councils of 
conciliation, to which all other disputes between nations 
shall be submitted for consideration and recommendation; 
(3) the formation of a League of Nations, all the nations 
belonging to which shall bind themselves to cut off com- 
mercial intercourse with any member-nation that threatens 
war against another m.ember unthout having first sub- 
mitted its dispute for conciliation or judicial hearing; 
and to use their joint military forces against any member- 
nation that actually goes to war against another nation 
belonging to the League without first submitting its case 
to the international court or committee of conciliation 
and awaiting its decision or recommendation. 

In the address of which the greater part is here given. 
President Wilson, nearly a year before America entered 
the War, made clear his acceptance of the third of these 
principles, by which the League is distinguished from 

3S 



most other peace societies — the principle that "coercion" 
must be summoned to the service of peace; and he declared 
it to be the duty of the United States, after the war, to 
become a member of "' any feasible association of nations" 
which might be formed for this purpose. This declaration 
was a very important step towards the final abandonment 
of the tradition of American isolation. 

After our entrance into the tear the President frequently 
returned to this subject, especially in his speech of January 
8, 1918 (No. XI), and at the opening of the Third Liberty 
Loan (No. XIII).] 

This Great War that broke so suddenly upon the 
world two years ago, and which has swept within its 
flame so great a part of the civilized world, has affected 
us very profoundly, and we are not only at liberty, it 
is perhaps our duty, to speak very frankly of it and of 
the great interests of civilization which it affects. 

With its causes and its objects we are not concerned. 
The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood 
has burst forth we are not interested to search for or 
explore. But so great a flood, spread far and wide to 
every quarter of the globe, has of necessity engulfed 
many a fair province of right that lies very near to us. 
Our own rights as a nation, the liberties, the privileges, 
and the property of our people have been profoundly 
affected. We are not mere disconnected lookers-on. 
The longer the war lasts, the more deeply do we become 
concerned that it should be brought to an end and the 
world be permitted to resume its normal life and course 
again . And when it does come to an end we shall be as 
much concerned as the nations at war to see peace 

36 



assume an aspect of permanence, pive promise of days 
from which the anxiety of uncertainty shall be lifted, 
bring some assurance that peace and war shall always 
hereafter be reckoned part of the common interest of 
mankind. We are participants, whether we would or not, 
in the life of the world. The interests of all nations are our 
own also. We are partners with the rest. What affects 
mankind is inevitably our affair as well as the affair of 
the nations of Europe and of Asia. 

One observation on the causes of the present War we 
are at liberty to make, and to make it may throw some 
light forward upon the future, as well as backward upon 
the past. It is plain that this war could have come only 
as it did, suddenly and out of secret counsels, without 
warning to the world, without discussion, without any 
of the deliberate movements of counsel with which it 
would seem natural to approach so stupendous a con- 
test. It is probable that if it had been foreseen just 
what would happen, just what alliances would be 
formed, just what forces arrayed against one another, 
those who brought the great contest on would have 
been glad to substitute conference for force. If we 
ourselves had been afforded some opportunity to ap- 
prise the belligerents of the attitude which it would be 
our duty to take, of the policies and practices against 
which we would feel bound to use all our moral and 
economic strength, and in certain circumstances even 
our physical strength also, our own contribution to the 
counsel which might have averted the struggle would 
have been considered worth weighing and regarding. 

And the lesson which the shock of being taken by 
surprise in a matter so deeply vital to all the nations of 

37 



the world has made poignantly clear is, that the peace 
of the world must henceforth depend upon a new and 
more wholesome diplomacy . Only when the great nations 
of the world have reached some sort of agreement as to 
what they hold to he fundamental to their common interest, 
and as to some feasible method of acting in concert when 
any nation or group of nations seeks to disturb those 
fundamental things, can we feel that civilization is at last 
in a way of justifying its existence and claiming to he 
finally established. It is clear that nations must in the 
future he governed by the same high code of honor that 
we demand of individuals . 

We must, indeed, in the very same breath with which 
we avow this conviction admit that we have ourselves 
upon occasion in the past been offenders against the 
law of diplomacy which we thus forecast; but our con- 
viction is not the less clear, but rather the more clear, 
on that account. 7/ this war has accomplished nothing 
else for the benefit of the world, it has at least disclosed a 
great moral necessity and set forward the thinking of 
the statesmen of the world by a whole age. Repeated 
utterances of the leading statesmen of most of the great 
nations now engaged in war have made it plain that their 
thought has come to this, that the principle of public right 
must henceforth take precedence over the individual 
interests of particular nations, and that the nations of the 
world must in some way band themselves together to see 
that that right prevails as against any sort of selfish aggres- 
sion; that henceforth alliance must not be set up against 
alliance, understanding against understanding , but that 
there must he a common agreement for a common object, 
and that at the heart of that common object must lie the 

38 



inviolable rights of peoples and of mankind. The nations 
of the world have become each other s neighbors. It is to 
their interest that they should understand each other. In 
order that they may understand each other, it is imperative 
that they should agree to cooperate in a common cause, 
and that they should so act that the* guiding principle of 
that common cause shall be even-handed and impartial 
justice. 

This is undoubtedly the thought of America. This is 
what we ourselves will say when there comes proper 
occasion to say it. In the dealings of nations with one 
another arbitrary force must be rejected and we must 
move forward to the thought of the modern world , the 
thought of which peace is the very atmosphere. That 
thought constitutes a chief part of the passionate 
conviction of America. 

We believe these fundamental things: First, that 
every people has a right to choose the sovereignty under 
which it shall live. Like other nations, we have our- 
selves no doubt once and again offended against that 
principle when for a little while controlled by selfish 
passion, as our franker historians have been honorable 
enough to admit; but it has become more and more our 
rule of life and action. Second, that the small states of 
the world have a right to enjoy the same respect for their 
sovereignty and for their territorial integrity that great 
and powerful nations expect and insist upon. And, 
third, that the world has a right to be free from every 
disturbance of its peace that has its origin in aggression 
and disregard of the rights of peoples and nations. 

So sincerely do we believe in these things that I am 
sure that I speak the mind and wish of the people of 

39 



America when I say that the United States is willing to 
become a partner in any feasible association of nations 
formed in order to realize these objects and make them 
secure against violation. 

There is nothing that the United States wants for 
itself that any other nation has . We are willing, on the 
contrary, to limit ourselves along with them to a pre- 
scribed course of duty and respect for the rights of 
others which will check any selfish passion of our own, 
as it will check any aggressive impulse of theirs . , . 

I did not come here, let me repeat, to discuss a pro- 
gram. I came only to avow a creed and give expression 
tojhe confidence I feel that the world is even now vpon the 
eve of a great consummation, when some common force 
will be brought into existence which shall safeguard right 
as the first and most fundamental interest of all peoples 
and all governments, when coercion, shall be summoned not 
to the service of political ambition or selfish hostility, but 
to the service of a common order, a common justice, and a 
common peace. God grant that the dawn of that day of 
frank dealing and of settled peace, concord, and cooperation 
may be near at hand! 



40 



V. THE REASONS FOR AMERICA'S EN- 
TRANCE INTO THE WAR 

(Address to Congress advising that Germany's Course 

Be Declared War Against the United States . DeUvered 

in Joint Session, April 2, 1917.) 

Gentlemen, OF the Congress: 

I have called the Congress into extraordinary session 
because there are serious, very serious, choices of 
policy to be made, and made immediately, which it 
was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that 
I should assume the responsibility of making. 

On the third of February last I officially laid before 
you the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial 
German Government that on and after the first day of 
February it was its purpose to put aside all restraints 
of law or of humanity and use its submarines to sink 
every vessel that sought to approach either the ports 
of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of 
Europe or any of the ports controlled by the enemies 
of Germany within the Mediterranean. That had 
seemed to be the object of the German submarine war- 
fare earlier in the War, but since April of last year the 
Imperial Government had somewhat restrained the 
commanders of its undersea craft in conformity with its 
promise then given to us that passenger boats should not 
be sunk and that due warning would be given to all 
other vessels which its submarines might seek to destroy, 
when no resistance was offered or escape attempted, 
and care taken that their crews were given at least a 

41 



fair chance to save their lives in their open boats. The 
precautions taken were meager and haphazard enough, 
as was proved in distressing instance after instance in 
the progress of the cruel and unmanly business, but a 
certain degree of restraint was observed . The new policy 
has swept every restriction aside. Vessels of every kind, 
whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their 
destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly sent 
to the bottom without warning, and without thought of 
help or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly 
neutrals along with those of belligerents . Even hospital 
ships and ships carrying relief to the sorely bereaved 
and stricken people of Belgium, though the latter were 
provided with safe conduct through the proscribed 
areas by the German Government itself and were dis- 
tinguished by unmistakable marks of identity, have 
been sunk with the same reckless lack of compassion 
or of principle. 

I was for a little while unable to believe that such 
things would in fact be done by any government that 
had hitherto subscribed to the humane practices of 
civilized nations. International law had its origin in 
the attempt to set up some law which would be re- 
spected and observed upon the seas, where no nation 
had right of dominion and where lay the free highways 
of the world- By painful stage after stage has that law 
been built up, with meager enough results, indeed, after 
all was accomplished that could be accomplished, but 
always with a clear view, at least, of what the heart 
and conscience of mankind demanded. This minimum 
of right the German Government has swept aside under 
the plea of retaliation and necessity and because it had 

42 



no weapons which it could use at sea except these which 
it is impossible to employ as it is employing them with- 
out throwing to the winds all scruples of humanity or 
of respect for the understandings that were supposed to 
underlie the intercourse of the world. I am not now 
thinking of the loss of property involved, immense and 
serious as that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale 
destruction of the lives of non-combatants, men, 
women, and children, engaged in pursuits which have 
always, even in the darkest periods of modern history, 
been deemed innocent and legitimate. Property can 
be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people 
cannot be. The present German submarine warfare 
against commerce is a warfare against mankind. 

It is a war against all nations. American ships have 
been sunk, American lives taken, in ways which it has 
stirred us very deeply to learn of, bvt the ships and people 
of other neutral and friendly nations have been sunk and 
overwhelmed in the waters in the same way. There has 
been no discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind. 
Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it. The 
choice we make for ourselves must be made with a modera- 
tion of counsel and a temperateness of judgment befitting 
our character and our motives as a nation. We must put 
excited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or 
the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, 
but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which 
we are only a sijigle champion. 

When I addressed the Congress on the twenty-sixth 
of February last I thought that it would suffice to assert 
our neutral rights with arms, our right to use the seas 
against unlawful interference, our right to keep our 

43 



people safe against unlawful violence. But armed neu- 
trality, it now appears, is impracticable. Because 
submarines are in effect outlaws when used as the Ger- 
man submarines have been used against merchant 
shipping, it is impossible to defend ships against their 
attacks as the law of nations has assumed that mer- 
chantmen would defend themselves against privateers 
or cruisers, visible craft giving chase upon the open sea. 
It is common prudence in such circumstances, grim 
necessity indeed, to endeavor to destroy them before 
they have shown their own intention. They must be 
dealt with upon sight, if dealt with at all. The German 
Government denies the right of neutrals to use arms 
at all within the areas of the sea which it has proscribed, 
even in the defense of rights which no modern publicist 
has ever before questioned their right to defend. The 
intimation is conveyed that the armed guards which 
we have placed on our merchant ships will be treated as 
beyond the pale of law and subject to be dealt with as 
pirates would be. Armed neutrality is ineffectual 
enough at best; in such circumstances and in the face of 
such pretensions it is worse than ineffectual; it is likely 
only to produce what it was meant to prevent; it is 
practically certain to draw us into the War without 
either the rights or the effectiveness of belligerents. 
There is one choice tee cannot make, we are incapable of 
making: we will not choose the path of submission and 
suffer the most sacred rights of our nation and our 'people 
to he ignored or violated. The wrongs against which we 
now array ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to 
the very roots of human life. 

With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical 
44 



character of the step I am taking and of the grave respon- 
sibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience 
to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the 
Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German 
Government to be in fact nothing less than war against 
the Government and people of the United States; that it 
formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus 
been thrust upon it; and thai it take immediate steps not 
only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense 
but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources 
to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms 
and end the war. 

What this will involve is clear . It will involve the ut- 
most practicable cooperation in counsel and action with 
the governments now at war with Germany, and, as 
incident to that, the extension to those governments of 
the most liberal financial credits, in order that our 
resources may so far as possible be added to theirs. It 
will involve the organization and mobilization of all the 
material resources of the country to supply the materials 
of war and serve the incidental needs of the nation in 
the most abundant and yet the most economical and 
efficient way possible. It will involve the immediate 
full equipment of the navy in all respects, but particu- 
larly in supplying it with the best means of dealing with 
the enemy's submarines. It will involve the immediate 
addition to the armed forces of the United States already 
provided for by law in case of war of at least five hundred 
thousand men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen 
upon the principle of universal liability to service, and 
also the authorization of subsequent additional incre- 
ments of equal force so soon as they may be needed and 

45 



can be handled in training. It will involve also, of 
course, the granting of adequate credits to the Govern- 
ment, sustained, I hope, so far as they can equitably 
be sustained by the present generation, by well con- 
ceived taxation. 

I say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxation 
because it seems to me that it would be most unwise to 
base the credits which will now be necessary entirely on 
money borrowed. It is our duty, I most respectfully 
urge, to protect our people so far as we may against 
the very serious hardships and evils which would be 
likely to arise out of the inflation which would be pro- 
duced by vast loans. 

In carrying out the measures by which these things 
are to be accomplished we should keep constantly in 
mind the wisdom of interfering as little as possible in 
our own preparation and in the equipment of our own 
military forces with the duty, — for it will be a very 
practical duty, — of supplying the nations already at 
war with Germany with the materials which they can 
obtain only from us or by our assistance. They are in 
the field and we should help them in every way to be 
effective there. 

I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through the 
several executive departments of the Government, for 
the consideration of your committees, measures for the 
accomplishment of the several objects I have mentioned . 
I hope that it will be your pleasure to deal with them as 
having been framed after very careful thought by the 
branch of the Government upon which the respon- 
sibility of conducting the war and safeguarding the 
nation will most directly fall. 

46 



While we do these things, these deeply momentous 
things, let us be very clear, and make very clear to all 
the world what our motives and our objects are. My 
own thought has not been driven from its habitual and 
normal course by the unhappy events of the last two 
months, and I do not believe that the thought of the 
nation has been altered or clouded by them. I have 
exactly the same things in mind now that I had in mind 
when I addressed the Senate on the twenty-second of 
January last; the same that I had in mind when I 
addressed the Congress on the third of February and 
on the twenty- sixth of February. Our object now, as 
then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice 
in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic 
power and to set up amongst the really free and self-gov- 
erned peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and 
of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those 
principles. Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable 
where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom 
of its peoples; and the menace to that peace and freedom 
lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by 
organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not 
by the will of their people. We have seen the last of neu- 
trality in such circumstances. We are at the beginning 
of an age in which it will be insisted that the same stand- 
ards of conduct and responsibility for wrong done shall be 
observed among nations and their governments that are 
observed among the individual citizens of civilized states. 

We have no quarrel with the German people. We 
have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and 
friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their 
government acted in entering this War. It was not 

47 



with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a 
war determined upon as wars used to be determined 
upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were 
nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were pro- 
voked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little 
groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use 
their fellow men as pawns and tools. Self-governed 
nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies or set 
the course of intrigue to" bring about some critical 
posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity 
to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be 
successfully worked out only under cover and where no 
one has the right to ask questions. Cunningly con- 
trived plans of deception or aggression, carried, it 
may be, from generation to generation, can be worked 
out and kept from the light only within the privacy of 
courts or behind the carefully guarded confidences of a 
narrow and privileged class. They are happily im- 
possible where public opinion commands and insists 
upon full information concerning all the nation's affairs. 

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained 
except by a partnership of democratic nations. No auto- 
cratic government could be trusted to keep faith toithin 
it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honor, 
a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals 
away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what 
they would and render account to no one would be a corrup- 
tion seated at its very heart. Only free peoples can hold 
their purpose and their honor steady to a common end and 
prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest 
of their own. 

Does not every American feel that assurance has been 
48 



added to our hope for the future peace of the world by 
the wonderful and heartening things that have been 
happening within the last few weeks in Russia? Russia 
was known by those who knew her best to have been 
always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital 
habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships 
of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their 
habitual attitude towards life. The autocracy that 
crowned the summit of her political structure, long as 
it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its poAver, 
was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or purpose; 
and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous 
Russian people have been added in all their naive 
majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for 
freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace. Here 
is a fit partner for a League of Honor. 

One of the things that has served to convince us that 
the Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our 
friend is that from the very outset of the present war it 
has filled oiu* unsuspecting communities and even our 
offices of government with spies and set criminal in- 
trigues everywhere afoot against our national unity of 
coimsel, our peace within and without, our industries 
and our commerce. Indeed it is now evident that its 
spies were here even before the war began; and it is 
imhappily not a matter of conjecture but a fact proved 
in our courts of justice that the intrigues which have 
more than once come perilously near to disturbing the 
peace and dislocating the industries of the coimtry have 
been carried on at the instigation, with the support, and 
even under the personal direction of official agents of the 
Imperial Government accredited to the Government of 

49 



the United States. Even in checking these things and 
trying to extirpate them we have sought to put the 
most generous interpretation possible upon them, 
because we knew that their source lay, not in any hostile 
feeling or purpose of the German people towards us (who 
were, no doubt, as ignorant of them as we ourselves 
were), but only in the selfish designs of a Government 
that did what it pleased and told its people nothing. 
But they have played their part in serving to convince 
us at last that that Government entertains no real 
friendship for us and means to act against our peace and 
security at its convenience. That it means to stir up 
enemies against us at our very doors the intercepted 
note to the German Minister at Mexico City is eloquent 
evidence. 

We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose be- 
cause we know that in such a government, following 
such methods, we can never have a friend; and that in 
the presence of its organized power, always lying in wait 
to accomplish we know not what purpose, there can be 
no assured security for the democratic governments of 
the world. We are now about to accept gauge of battle 
with this natural foe to liberty and shall, if necessary, 
spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify 
its pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that we 
see the facts with no veil of false pretence about them, to 
fight thus for the ultimate 'peace of the world and for the 
liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: 
for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege 
of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obed- 
ience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its 
peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of 

SO 



political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We 
desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities 
for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we 
shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of 
the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those 
rights have been made as secure as the faith and the free- 
dom of nations can make them. 

Just because we fight without rancor and without 
selfish object, seeking nothing for ourselves but what we 
shall wish to share with all free peoples, we shall, I feel 
confident, conduct our operations as belligerents with- 
out passion and ourselves observe with proud punctilio 
the principles of right and of fair play we profess to be 
fighting for. 

I have said nothing of the governments allied with the 
Imperial Government of Germany because they have 
not made war upon us or challenged us to defend our 
right and our honor. The Austro-Hungarian Govern- 
ment has, indeed, avowed its unqualified endorsement 
and acceptance of the reckless and lawless submarine 
warfare adopted now without disguise by the Imperial 
German Government, and it has therefore not been 
possible for this Government to receive Count Tar- 
nowski, the Ambassador recently accredited to this 
Government by the Imperial and Royal Government 
of Austria-Hungary; but that Government has not 
actually engaged in warfare against citizens of the 
United States on the seas, and I take the liberty, for the 
present at least, of postponing a discussion of our rela- 
tions with the authorities at Vienna. We enter this 
war only where we are clearly forced into it because 
there are no other means of defending our rights. 

51 



It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves as 
belligerents in a high spirit of right and fairness because 
we act without animus, not in enmity towards a people 
or with the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage 
upon them, but only in armed opposition to an irre- 
sponsible government which has thrown aside all con- 
siderations of humanity and of right and is running 
amuck. We are, let me say again, the sincere friends 
of the German people, and shall desire nothing so much 
as the early re-establishment of intimate relations of 
mutual advantage between us, — however hard it may 
be for them, for the time being, to believe that this is 
spoken from our hearts. We have borne with their 
present government through all these bitter months be- 
cause of that friendship, — exercising a patience and for- 
bearance which would otherwise have been impossible. 
We shall, happily, still have an opportunity to prove 
that friendship in our daily attitude and actions towards 
the millions of men and women of German birth and 
native sympathy who live amongst usand share our life, 
and we shall be proud to prove it towards all who are in 
fact loyal to their neighbors and to the Government 
in the hour of test. They are, most of them, as true and 
loyal Americans as if they had never known any other 
fealty or allegiance. They will be prompt to stand with 
us in rebuking and restraining the few who may be of a 
different mind and purpose. If there should be dis- 
loyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern 
repression; but, if it lifts its head at all, it will lift it 
only here and there and without countenance except 
from a lawless and malignant few. 

It is a distressing and oppressive duty. Gentlemen of 
52 



the Congress, which I have performed in thus addressing 
you. There are, it may be, many months of jiery trial and 
sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this 
great 'peaceful 'people into war, into the most terrible and 
disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the 
balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and 
we shall fight for the things which we have always carried 
nearest our hearts, for democracy, for the right of those 
who submit to authority to have a voice in their own gov- 
ernments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for 
a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peo- 
ples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make 
the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedi- 
cate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and 
everything that we have, with the pride of those who know 
that the day has come when America is privileged to spend 
her blood and her might for the 'principles that gave her 
birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. 
God helping her, she can do no other. 



SS 



VI. WHY AMERICA WAS KEPT UNITED 

(Address to Confederate Veterans, at their Twenty- 
seventh Annual Convention, Washington, D. C, 
June 5, 1917.) 

Mr. Commander, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I esteem it a very great pleasure and a real privilege 
to extend to the men who are attending this reunion the 
very cordial greetings of the Government of the United 
States. 

I suppose that as you mix with one another you chiefly 
find these to be days of memory, when your thoughts go 
back and recall those days of struggle in which your 
hearts were strained, in which the whole nation seemed 
in grapple, and I dare say that you are thrilled as you 
remember the heroic things that were then done. You 
are glad to remember that heroic things were done on 
both sides, and that men in those days fought in some- 
thing like the old spirit of chivalric gallantry. There are 
many memories of the Civil War that thrill along the 
blood and make one proud to have been sprung of a 
race that could produce such bravery and constancy; 
and yet the world does not live on memories. The world 
is constantly making its toilsome way forward into 
new and different days, and I believe that one of the 
things that contributes satisfaction to a reunion like 
this and a welcome like this is that this is a day of 
oblivion . There are some things that we have thankfully 
buried, and among them are the great passions of divi- 
sion which once threatened to rend this nation in 

54 



twain. The passion of admiration we still entertain for 
the heroic figures of those old days, but the passion of 
separation, the passion of difference of principle, is 
gone — gone out of our minds, gone out of our hearts; 
and one of the things that will thrill this country as 
it reads of this reunion is that it will read also of a re- 
dedication on the part of all of us to the great nation 
which we serve in common. 

These are days of oblivion as well as of memory; for 
we are forgetting the things that once held us asunder. 
Not only that, but they are days of rejoicing, because 
we now at last see why this great nation was kept 
united; for we are beginning to see the great world pur- 
poses which it was meant to serve. Many men, I know, 
particularly of your own generation, have wondered at 
some of the dealings of Providence, but the wise heart 
never questions the dealings of Providence, because 
the great, long plan as it unfolds has a majesty about 
it and a definiteness of purpose, an elevation of ideal, 
which we were incapable of conceiving as we tried to 
work things out with our own short sight and weak 
strength. And now that we see ourselves part of a 
nation united, powerful, great in. spirit and in purpose, 
we know the gTeat ends which God, in His mysterious 
providence, ^v^ought through our instrumentality, 
because at the heart of the men of the North and of the 
South there was the same love of self-government and 
of liberty, and now we are to be an instrument in the 
hands of God to see that liberty is made secure for 
mankind. . . . 

As I came along the streets a few minutes ago my 
heart was full of the thought that this is Registration 

55 



Day. Will you not support me in feeling that there is 
some significance in this coincidence, that this day, 
when I come to welcome you to the national capital, is 
a day when men young as you were in those old days, 
when you gathered together to fight, are now registering 
their names as evidence of this great idea, that in a 
democracy the duty to serve and the privilege to serve 
falls upon all alike? There is something very fine, my 
fellow-citizens, in the spirit of the volunteer, but deeper 
than the volunteer spirit is the spirit of obligation. 
There is not a man of us who must not hold himself 
ready to be summoned to the duty of supporting the 
great Government under which we live. No really 
thoughtful and patriotic man is jealous of that obliga- 
tion. No man who really understands the privilege and 
the dignity of being an American citizen quarrels for a 
moment with the idea that the Congress of the United 
States has the right to call upon whom it "s\dll to serve 
the nation. These solemn lines of young men going to- 
day all over the Union to places of registration ought 
to be a signal to the world, to those who dare flout the 
dignity and honor and rights of the United States, that 
all her manhood will flock to that standard under which 
we all delight to serve, and that he who challenges the 
rights and principles of the United States challenges the 
united strength and devotion of a nation. 

There are not many things that one desires about war, 
my fellow-citizens, but you have come through war, you 
know how you have been chastened by it, and there 
comes a time when it is good for a nation to know that it 
must sacrifice if need be everything that it has to vindi- 
cate the principles which it professes. We have pros 

56 



pered with a sort of heedless and irresponsible pros- 
perity. Now we are going to lay all our wealth, if 
necessary, and spend all our blood, if need be, to show 
that we were not accumulating that wealth selfishly, but 
were accumulating it for the service of mankind . M en 
all over the world have thought of the United States as 
a trading and money-getting people, whereas we who 
have lived at home know the ideals with which the 
hearts of this people have thrilled; we know the sober 
convictions which have lain at the basis of our life all 
the time, and we know the power and devotion which 
can be spent in heroic ways for the service of those 
ideals that we have treasured. We have been allowed 
to become strong in the Providence of God that our 
strength might be used to prove, not our selfishness, 
but our greatness, and if there is any ground for thank- 
fulness in a day like this, I am thankful for the privilege 
of self-sacrifice, which is the only privilege that lends 
dignity to the human spirit. . . . 



Sf 



VII. FLAG DAY ADDRESS 

(Delivered at Washmgton, D. C, June 14, 1917.) 

My Fellow Citizens: 

We meet to celebrate Flag Day because this flag which 
we honor and under which we serve is the emblem of our 
unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation. 
It has no other character than that which we give it 
from generation to generation. The choices are ours. 
It floats in majestic silence above the hosts that execute 
those choices, whether in peace or in war. And yet, 
though silent, it speaks to us — speaks to us of the past, 
of the men and women who went before us and of the 
records they wrote upon it. We celebrate the day of 
its birth; and from its birth until now it has witnessed 
a great history, has floated on high the symbol of great 
events, of a great plan of life worked out by a great 
people. We are about to carry it into battle, to lift 
it where it will draw the fire of our enemies. We are 
about to bid thousands, hundreds of thousands, it may 
be millions, of our men, the young, the strong, the 
capable men of the nation, to go forth and die beneath 
it on fields of blood far away — for what? For some 
unaccustomed thing? For something for which it has 
never sought the fire before? American armies were 
never before sent across the seas. Why are they sent 
now? For some new purpose, for which this great flag 
has never been carried before, or for some old, familiar, 
heroic purpose for which it has seen men, its own men, 

58 



die on every battlefield upon which Americans have 
borne arms since the Revolution? 

These are questions which must be answered . We are 
Americans. We in our turn serve America, and can 
serve her with no private purpose. We must use her flag 
as she has always used it. We are accountable at the 
bar of history and must plead in utter frankness what 
purpose it is we seek to serve. 

It is plain enough how we were forced into the war . 
The -extraordinary insults and aggressions of the Im- 
perial German Government left us no self-respecting 
choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights as a 
free people and of our honor as a sovereign govern- 
ment. The military masters of Germany denied us the 
right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting com- 
munities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought 
to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf. 
When they found that they could not do that, their 
agents diligently spread sedition amongst us and sought 
to draw our own citizens from their allegiance — and 
some of those agents were men connected with the 
oflBcial Embassy of the Germany Government itself 
here in our own capital. They sought by violence to 
destroy our industries and arrest our commerce. They 
tried to incite Mexico to take up arms against us and to 
draw Japan into a hostile alliance with her — and that, 
not by indirection, but by direct suggestion from the 
Foreign Office in Berlin, They impudently denied us 
the use of the high seas and repeatedly executed their 
threat that they would send to their death any of our 
people who ventured to approach the coasts of Europe. 
And many of our own people w^ere corrupted. Men 

59 



began to look upon their own neighbors with suspicion 
and to wonder in their hot resentment and surprise 
whether there was any community in which hostile 
intrigue did not lurk. What great nation in such cir- 
cumstances would not have taken up arms? Much as 
we had desired peace, it was denied us, and not of our 
own choice. This flag under which we serve would have 
been dishonored had we withheld our hand . 

But that is only part of the story. We know now as 
clearly as we knew before we were ourselves engaged 
that we are not the enemies of the German people and 
that they are not our enemies. They did not originate 
or desire this hideous war or wish that we should be 
drawn into it; and we are vaguely conscious that we are 
fighting their cause, as they will some day see it, as well 
as our own. They are themselves in the grip of the same 
sinister power that has now at last stretched its ugly 
talons out and drawn blood from us. The whole world 
is at war because the whole world is in the grip of that 
power and is trying out the great battle which shall 
determine whether it is to be brought under its mastery 
or fling itself free. 

The war was begun by the military masters of Ger- 
many, who proved to be also the masters of Austria- 
Hungary. These men have never regarded nations as 
peoples, men, women, and children of like blood and 
frame as themselves, for whom governments existed 
and in whom governments had their life. They have 
regarded them merely as serviceable organizations 
which they could by force or intrigue bend or corrupt 
to their own pm-pose. They have regarded the smaller 
states, in particular, and the peoples who could be over- 

60 



whelmed by force, as their natural tools and instru- 
ments of domination. Their purpose has long been 
avowed. The statesmen of other nations, to whom that 
purpose was incredible, paid little attention; regarded 
what German professors expounded in their classrooms 
and German writers set forth to the world as the goal 
of German policy as rather the dream of minds de- 
tached from practical affairs, as preposterous private 
conceptions of German destiny, than as the actual 
plans of responsible rulers; but the rulers of Germany 
themselves knew all the while w^hat concrete plans, 
what well advanced intrigues lay back of what the 
professors and the writers were saying, and were glad 
to go forward unmolested, filling the thrones of Balkan 
states with German princes, putting German officers 
at the service of Turkey to drill her armies and make 
interest with her government, developing plans of 
sedition and rebellion in India and Egypt, setting their 
fires in Persia. The demands made by Austria upon 
Servia were a mere single step in a plan which compassed 
Europe and Asia, from Berlin to Bagdad. They hoped 
those demands might not arouse Europe, but they 
meant to press them whether they did or not, for they 
thought themselves ready for the final issue of arms. 

The military masters under whom Germany is bleed- 
ing see very clearly to what point Fate has brought 
them. If they fall back or are forced back an inch, 
their power both abroad and at home will fall to pieces 
like a house of cards. It is their power at home they 
are thinking about now more than their power abroad. 
It is that power which is trembling under their very 
feet; and deep fear has entered their hearts. They have 

61 



but one chance to perpetuate their miUtary power or 
even their controlHng political influence. If they can 
secure peace now with the immense advantages still 
in their hands which they have up to this point appar- 
ently gained, they will have justified themselves before 
the German people; they will have gained by force what 
they promised to gain by it: an immense expansion of 
German power, an immense enlargement of German 
industrial and commercial opportunities . Their prestige 
will be secure, and with their prestige their political 
power. If they fail, their oeople will thrust them aside; 
a government accountable to the people themselves will 
be set up in Germany as it has been in England, in 
the United States, in France, and in all the great 
countries of the modern time except Germany. If they 
succeed they are safe and Germany and the world are 
undone; if they fail Germany is saved and the world will 
be at peace. If they succeed, America will fall within 
the menace. We and all the rest of the world must 
remain armed, as they will remain, and must make 
ready for the next step in their aggression; if they fail, 
the world may unite for peace and Germany may be 
of the union. 

Do you not now understand the new intrigue, the 
intrigue for peace, and why the masters of Germany do 
not hesitate to use any agency that promises to effect 
their purpose, the deceit of the nations.'^ Their present 
particular aim is to deceive all those who throughout 
the world stand for the rights of peoples and the self- 
government of nations; for they see what immense 
strength the forces of justice and of liberalism are 
gathering out of this war. They are employing liberals 

62 



in their enterprise. They are using men, in Germany 
and without, as their spokesmen whom they have 
hitherto despised and oppressed, using them for their 
own destruction — sociaHsts, the leaders of labor, the 
thinkers they have hitherto sought to silence. Let 
them once succeed and these men, now their tools, will 
be ground to powder beneath the weight of the great 
military empire they will have set up; the revolutionists 
in Russia will be cut off from all succor or cooperation 
in western Europe and a counter revolution fostered and 
supported; Germany herself will lose her chance of 
freedom; and all Europe will arm for the next, the final 
struggle. 

The sinister intrigue is being no less actively con- 
ducted in this country than in Russia and in every 
country in Europe to which the agents and dupes of the 
Imperial German Government can get access. That 
government has many spokesmen here, in places high 
and low. They have learned discretion. They keep 
within the law. It is opinion they utter now, not 
edition. They proclaim the liberal purposes of their 
masters; declare this a foreign war which can touch 
America with no danger to either her lands or her in- 
stitutions; set England at the center of the stage and 
talk of her ambition to assert economic dominion 
throughout the world; appeal to our ancient tradition 
of isolation in the politics of the nations; and seek to 
undermine the government with false professions of 
loyalty to its principles. 

But they will make no headway. The false betray 
themselves always in every accent. It is only friends 
and partisans of the German Government whom we 

63 



have already identified who utter these thinly disguised 
loyalties. The facts are patent to all the world, and 
nowhere are they more plainly seen than in the United 
States, whefe we are accustomed to deal with facts 
and not with sophistries; and the great fact that stands 
out above all the rest is that this is a People's War, a 
war for freedom and justice and self-government 
amongst all the nations of the world, a war to make the 
world safe for the peoples who live upon it and have 
made it their own, the German peoples themselves 
included; and that with us rests the choice to break 
through all these hypocrisies and patent cheats and 
masks of brute force and help set the world free or else 
stand aside and let it be dominated a long age through 
by sheer weight of arms and the arbitrary choices of 
self-constituted masters, by the nation which can main- 
tain the biggest armies and the most irrestible arma- 
ments — a power to which the world has afforded no 
parallel and in the face of which political freedom must 
wither and perish. 

For us there is but one choice. We have made it. 
Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand 
in our way in this day of high resolution when every 
principle we hold dearest is to be vindicated and made 
secure for the salvation of the nations. We are ready 
to plead at the bar of history, and our flag shall wear a 
new luster. Once more we shall make good with our 
lives and fortunes the great faith to which we were 
born, and a new glory shall shine in the face of our 
people. 



64 



VIII. THE FINAL TEST OF AN 
AMERICAN 

(Passages from an Address before the American Federa- 
tion of Labor, Buffalo, N. Y., November 12, 1917.) 

Mr. President, Delegates of the American 
Federation of Labor, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

I esteem it a great privilege and a real honor to be 
thus admitted to your public counsels. When your ex- 
ecutive committee paid me the compliment of inviting 
me here, I gladlj^ accepted the invitation because it 
seems to me that this, above all other times in our 
history, is the time for common counsel, for the draw- 
ing together not only of the energies but of the minds 
of the Nation. I thought that it was a welcome oppor- 
tunity for disclosing to you some of the thoughts that 
have been gathering in my mind during the last momen- 
tous months. 

I am introduced to you as the President of the United 
States, and yet I would be pleased if you would put the 
thought of the office into the background and regard me 
as one of your fellow-citizens who has come here to 
speak, not the words of authority, but the words of 
counsel; the words which men should speak to one 
another who wish to be frank in a moment more critical 
perhaps than the history of the world has ever yet 
known; a moment when it is every man's duty to forget 
himself, to forget his own interests, to fill himself with 
the nobility of a great national and world conception, 
and act upon a new platform elevated above the ordi- 

65 



nary affairs of life and lifted to where inen have views 
of the long destiny of mankind. I think that in order to 
realize just what this moment of counsel is it is very de- 
sirable that we should remind ourselves just how this 
war came about and just what it is for. You can explain 
most wars very simply, but the explanation of this is 
not so simple. Its roots run deep into all the obscure 
soils of history, and in my view this is the last decisive 
issue between the old principles of power and the new 
principles of freedom. . . . 

May I not say that it is amazing to me that any group 
of persons should be so ill-informed as to suppose, as 
some groups in Russia apparently suppose, that any 
reforms planned in the interest of the people can live in 
the presence of a Germany powerful enough to under- 
mine or overthrow them by intrigue or force? Any 
body of free men that compounds with the present 
German Government is compounding for its own de- 
struction . But that is not the whole of the story. Any 
man in America or anywhere else that supposes that the 
free industry and enterprise of the world can continue 
if the Pan-German plan is achieved and German power 
fastened upon the world is as fatuous as the dreamers in 
Russia . What I am opposed to is not the feeling-of the 
pacifists, but their stupidity. My heart is with them, 
but my mind has a contempt for them. I want peace; 
but I know how to get it, and they do not. 

You will notice that I sent a friend of mine. Colonel 
House, to Europe, who is as great a lover of peace as 
any man in the world, but I didn't send him on a peace 
mission yet. I sent him to take part in a conference 
as to how the war was to be won, and he knows, as I 

66 



know, that that is the way to get peace if you want it 
for more than a few minutes. 

All of this is a preface to the conference that I have 
referred to with regard to what we are going to do. If 
we are true friends of freedom of our own or anybody 
else's, we will see that the power of this country and the 
productivity of this country is raised to its absolute 
maximum, and that absolutely nobody is allowed to 
stand in the way of it. When I say that nobody is 
allowed to stand in the way I do not mean that they 
shall be prevented by the power of the Government 
but by the power of the American spirit. Our duty, if 
we are to do this great thing and show America to be 
what we believe her to be — the greatest hope and energy 
of the world — is to stand together night and day until 
the job is finished. ... 

We are all of the same clay and spirit, and we can 
get together if ice desire to get together. Therefore, my 
counsel to you is this: Let us show ourselves Americans 
by showing that we do not want to go off in separate 
camps or groups by ourselves, but that we want to co- 
operate with all other classes and all other groups in the 
common enterprise which is to release the spirits of the 
world from bondage. I would be willing to set that up 
as the final test of an Americari. That is the meaning of 
democracy. I have been very much distressed, my 
fellow-citizens, by some of the things that have hap- 
pened recently. The mob spirit is displaying itself here 
and there in this country. I have no sympathy with 
what some men are saying, but I have no sympathy 
with the men who take their punishment into their 
own hands; and I want to say to every man who does 

67 



join such a mob that I do not recognize him as worthy 
of the free institutions of the United States. There are 
some organizations in this country whose object is 
anarchy and the destruction of law, but I would not 
meet their efforts by making myself partner in destroy- 
ing the law. I despise and hate their purposes as much 
as any man, but I respect the ancient processes of 
justice; and I would be too proud not to see them done 
justice, however wrong they are. 

So I want to utter my earnest protest against any 
manifestation of the spirit of lawlessness anywhere or 
in any cause. Why, gentlemen, look what it means. 
We claim to he the greatest democratic people in the 
world, and democracy means first of all that we can 
govern ourselves. If our men have not self-control, 
then they are not capable of that great thing which we 
call democratic government. A man who takes the 
law into his own hands is not the right man to cooperate 
in any formation or development of law and institutions, 
and some of the processes by which the struggle between 
capital and labor is carried on are processes that come 
very near to taking the law into your own hands. I 
do not mean for a moment to compare it un,th what I 
have just been speaking of, but I want you to see that 
they are mere gradations in this manifestation of the 
unvnllingness to cooperate, and that the fundamental 
lesson of the whole situation is that we must not only 
take common counsel, but that we must yield to and 
obey common counsel. Not all of the instrumentalities 
for this are at hand . I am hopeful that in the very near 
future new instrumentalities may be organized by 
which we can see to it that various things that are now 

68 



going on ought not to go on . There are various processes 
of the dilution of labor and the unnecessary substitution 
of labor and the bidding in distant markets and unfairly- 
upsetting the whole competition of labor which ought 
not to go on. I mean now on the part of employers, 
and we must interject into this some instrumentality 
of cooperation by which the fair thing will be done all 
around , I am hopeful that some such instrumentalities 
may be devised, but whether they are or not, we must 
use those that we have and upon every occasion where 
it is necessary have such an instrumentality originated 
upon that occasion. 

So, my fellow-citizens, the reason I came away from 
Washington is that I sometimes get lonely down there. 
There are so many people in Washington who know 
things that are not so, and there are so few people who 
know anything about what the people of the United 
States are thinking about. I have to come away and 
get reminded of the rest of the country. I have to come 
away and talk to men who are up against the real thing, 
and say to them, 'T am with you if you are with me." 
And the only test of being with me is not to think 
about me personally at all, but merely to think of me 
as the expression for the time being of the power and 
dignity and hope of the United States. 



69 



IX. ADDRESS TO CONGRESS STATING 

THE PEACE TERMS OF THE 

UNITED STATES 

(Delivered in Joint Session, January 8, 1918.) 

[This address marks the passage, in President Wilsons 
series of utterances concerning the war, from the presenta- 
tion of the general war-aims of the United States to the 
formulation of the specific terms of a peace settlement 
through which those aims may be realized. The address 
contains the celebrated "Fourteen Points" which, just 
nine months later, the German Government — its armies 
then being confronted with the certainty of an overwhelming 
military disaster — accepted as the basis for peace. 

The reader should compare President Wilso7t's "Four- 
teen Points" with the statement of peace terms of all the 
European Allies, set forth in Mr. Balfour's despatch of 
January 16, 1917. "These terms," declared the Allies, 
"can only be formulated in detail, with all the just com- 
pensations and indemnities due for the losses suffered, 
when the moment for negotiation arrives. But the civilized 
world knou's that they include, primarily and of necessity: 

The restoration of Belgium, of Serbia, and of Monte- 
negro, with the compensations due to them. 

The evacuation of the invaded territories in France, 
Russia, and Rumania, urith fitting reparation. 

The reorganization of Europe, guaranteed by c 
stable settlement, based alike upon the principle of nation- 
alities, on the right which all peoples, whether small or 
great, have to the enjoyment of full security and free 

70 



economic development, and aliso upon territorial agree- 
ments and international arrangements so framed as to 
guarantee land and sea frontiers against unjust attacks . 

The restitution of provinces or territories formerly 
torn from the Allies by force or contrary to the wishes of 
their inhabitants. 

The liberation of Italians, Slavs, Rumanians, 
Czechs t and Slovaks from foreign domination. 

The liberation of the peoples who now lie beneath 
the murderous tyranny of the Turks, and the expidsion 
from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, which has proved 
itself so radically alien to Western civilization." 

It should also be remembered that Mr. Balfour s note 
transmitting the above statement of the Allies observed 
that one of the conditions for a lasting peace must be 
that "behind international law and behind all treaty 
arrangemeyits for preventing or limiting hostilities, some 
form of international sanction should be devised which 
would give pause to the hardiest aggressor." It will 
thus be seen that, in broad outlines and underlying prin- 
ciples, the program laid down by Mr. Wilson in January, 
1918, was identical with that promulgated by the European 
Allies a year previous, and that at least nine of his fourteen 
conditions were explicitly set forth in the earlier statement, 
while others were contained in it by implication. For the 
subsequent action of both the Allied and the German Gov- 
ernments with respect to the "Fourteen Points," see the note 
introductory to the last address in this book (No. XIV). ] 

Gentlemen of the Congress: 

Once more, as repeatedly before, the spokesmen of the 
Central Empires have indicated their desire to discuss 

71 



the objects of the war and the possible basis of a general 
peace. Parleys have been in progress at Brest-Litovsk 
between Kussian representatives and representatives of 
the Central Powers to which the attention of all the 
belligerents has been invited for the purpose of ascer- 
taining whether it may be possible to extend these 
parleys into a general conference with regard to terms 
of peace and settlement. . . . 

But, whatever the results of the parleys at Brest- 
Litovsk, whatever the confusions of counsel and of 
purpose in the utterances of the spokesmen of the Cen- 
tral Kmpires, they have again attempted to acquaint 
the world with their objects in the war and have again 
challenged their adversaries to say what their objects 
are and what sort of settlement they would deem just 
and satisfactory. There is no good reason why that 
challenge should not be responded to, and responded 
to with the utmost candor. We did not wait for it. 
Not once, but again and again, we have laid our w'hole 
thought and purpose before the world, not in general 
terms only, but each time with sufficient definition to 
make it clear what sort of definite terms of settlement 
must necessarily spring out of them. Within the last 
week Mr. Lloyd George has spoken with admirable 
candor and in admirable spirit for the people and Gov- 
ei'nment of Great Britain. 

There is no confusion of counsel among the adversaries 
of the Central Powers, no uncertainty of principle, no 
vagueness of detail. The only secrecy of counsel, the 
only lack of fearless frankness, the only failure to make 
definite statement of the objects of the war, lies with 
Germany and her allies. The issues of life and death 

72 



hang upon these definitions. No statesman who has 
the least conception of his responsibility ought for a 
moment to permit himself to continue this tragical and 
appalling outpouring of blood and treasure unless he 
is sure beyond a peradventure that the objects of the 
vital sacrifice are part and parcel of the very life of 
Society and that the people for whom he speaks think 
them right and imperative as he does. 

There is, moreover, a voice calling for these definitions 
of principle and of purpose which is, it seems to me, 
more thrilling and more compelling than any of the 
many moving voices with which the troubled air of the 
world is filled. It is the voice of the Russian people. 
They are prostrate and all but helpless, it would seem, 
before the grim power of Germany, which has hitherto 
known no relenting and no pity. . Their power, ap- 
parently, is shattered. And yet their soul is not sub- 
servient. They will not yield either in principle or in 
action. Their conception of what is right, of what is 
humane and honorable for them to accept, has been 
stated with a frankness, a largeness of view, a generosity 
of spirit, and a universal human sympathy which must 
challenge the admiration of every friend of mankind; 
and they have refused to compound their ideals or 
desert others that they themselves may be safe. 

They call to us to say what it is that we desire, in 
what, if in anything, our purpose and our spirit differ 
from theirs; and I believe that, the people of the United 
States would wish me to respond, with utter simplicity 
and frankness. Whether their present leaders believe 
it or not, it is our heartfelt desire and hope that some 
way may be opened whereby we may be privileged to 

73 



assist the people of Russia to attain their utmost hope 
of Hberty and ordered peace. 

It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of 
peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open 
and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no 
secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest 
and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of 
secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular 
governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment 
to upset the peace of the world. It is this happy fact, 
now clear to the view of every public man whose 
thoughts do not still linger in an age that is dead and 
gone, which makes it possible for every nation whose 
purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of 
the world to avow now or at any other time the objects 
it has in view. 

We entered this war because violations of right had 
occurred which touched us to the quick arid made the life 
of our own people impossible unless they were corrected 
and the world secure once for all against their re- 
currence. 

What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing pecul- 
iar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe 
to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every 
peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live 
its own life, determine its oum ijistitutions, be assured of 
justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world 
as against force and selfish aggression. 

All the peoples of the icorld are in effect partners in this 
interest, and for our own part we see very clearly that 
unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us. 

The program of the world's peace, therefore, is our 
74 



program; and that program, the only possible program » 
as we see it, is this: 

1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, 
after which there shall be no private international un- 
derstandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed 
always frankly and in the public view. 

2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas. 
outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, 
except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by 
international action for the enforcement of international 
covenants. 

3. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic 
barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade 
conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace 
and associating themselves for its maintenance. 

4. Adequate guarantees given and taken that na- 
tional armaments will be reduced to the lowest points 
consistent with domestic safety. 

5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial 
adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict 
observance of the principle that in determining all such 
questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations 
concerned must have equal weight with the equitable 
claims ofthe government whose title is to be determined. 

6. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such 
a settlement of all questions affecting Kussia as will 
secure the best and freest cooperation of the other 
nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered 
and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent 
determination of her own political development and 

75 



national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into 
the society of free nations under institutions of her own 
choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of 
every kind that she may need and may herself desire. 
The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations 
in the months to come will be the acid test of their good 
will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished 
from their own interests, and of their intelligent and 
unselfish sympathy. 

7. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be 
evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit 
the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all 
other free nations. No other single act will serve 
as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations 
in the laws which they have themselves set and de- 
termined for the government of their relations with one 
another. Without this healing act the whole structure 
and validity of international law. is forever impaired. 

8. All French territory should be freed and the in- 
vaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France 
by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, 
which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly 
fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may 
once more be made secure in the interest of all. 

9. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should 
be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nation- 
ality. 

10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place 
among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and 
assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of 
autonomous development. 

76 



11. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be 
evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded 
free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of 
the several Balkan states to one another determined by 
friendly counsel along historically established lines of 
allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees 
of the political and economic independence and territor- 
ial integrity of the several Balkan states should be 
entered into. 

12. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman 
Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but 
the other nationalities which are now under Turkish 
rule should be assured an undoubted security of life 
and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autono- 
mous development, and the Dardanelles should be 
permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and 
commerce of all nations under international guarantees . 

13. An independent Polish state should be erected 
which should include the territories inhabited by in- 
disputably Polish populations, which should be assured 
a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political 
and economic independence and territorial integrity 
should be guaranteed by international covenant. 

14 . A general association of nations must be formed 
under specific ' covenants for the purpose of affording 
mutual guarantees of political independence and terri- 

.torial integrity to great and small states alike. 

In regard to these essential rectifications of wrong and 
assertions of right loe feel ourselves to he intimate 'partners 
of all the governments and peoples associated together 

77 



against the imferialists . We cannot he separated in inter- 
est or divided in -purpose. We stand together until the end: 

For such arrangements and covenants we are willing to 
fight and to continue to fight until they are achieved; hut 
only hecause we wish the right to prevail and desire a just 
and stahle peace such as can he secured only hy. removing 
the chief provocations to war, which this program does 
remove. 

We have no jealousy of German greatness, and there 
is nothing in this program that impairs it. We grudge 
her no achievement or distinction of learning or of 
pacific enterprise such as have made her record very 
bright and very enviable. We do not wish to injure 
her or to block in any way her legitimate influence or 
power. We do not wish to fight her either with arms or 
with hostile arrangements of trade if she is willing to 
associate herself with us and the other peace-loving 
nations of the world in covenants of justice and law 
and fair dealing. 

We wish her only to accept a place of equality among 
the peoples of the world, — the new world in which we 
now live, — instead of a place of mastery. 

Neither do we presume to suggest to her any altera- 
tion or modification of her institutions. But it is 
necessary, we must frankly say, and necessary as a 
preliminary to any intelligent dealings with her on our 
part, that we should know whom her spokesmen speak 
for when they speak to us, whether for the Reichstag 
majority or for the military party and the men whose 
creed is imperial domination. 

We have spoken now, surely, in terms too concrete to 
admit of any further doubt or question. An evident prin- 

;8 



ciple runs through the whole program I have outlined, it 
is the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, 
and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety 
with one another, whether they he strong or weak. 

Unless this principle be made its foundation no part 
of the structure of international justice can stand. The 
people of the United States could act upon no other prin- 
ciple; and to the vindication of this principle they are 
ready to devote their lives, their honor, and everything 
that they possess. The moral climax of this the culmi- 
nating and final war for human liberty has come, and they 
are ready to put their own strength, their oum highest 
purpose, their otcn integrity and devotion to the test. 



79 



X. THE WAR TO COMPLETE THE 

WORK BEGUN BY WASHINGTON AND 

HIS ASSOCIATES 

(Address at the T.omb of Washington, July 4, 1918.) 

Gentlemen of the Diplomatic Corps , and Mt 
Fellow Citizens: 

I am happy to draw apart with you to this quiet 
place of old counsel in order to speak a little of the 
meaning of this day of our nation's independence. 
The place seems very still and remote. It is as serene 
and untouched by the hurry of the world as it was in 
those great days long ago when General Washington 
was here and held leisurely conference with the men 
who were to be associated with him in the creation of 
a nation. 

From these gentle slopes they looked out upon the 
world and saw it whole, saw it with the" light of the 
future upon it, saw it with modern eyes that turned 
away from a past which men of liberated spirits could 
no longer endure. It is for that reason that we cannot 
feel even here, in the immediate presence of this sacred 
tomb, that this is a place of death. 

It was a place of achievement. A great promise 
that was meant for all mankind was here given plan 
and reality. The associations by which we are here 
surrounded are the inspiriting associations of that noble 
death which is only a glorious consummation. From 
this green hillside we also ought to be able to see with 
comprehending eyes that world that lies about us, and 
should conceive anew the purposes that must set men 
free. 

80 



It is significant — significant of their own character 
and purpose and of the influences they were setting afoot — 
that Washington and his associates, like the Barons at 
Runnymede, spoke and acted not for a class, but a people. 
It has been left for us to see to it that it shall be understood 
that they spoke and acted not for a single people only, 
but for all mankind . They were thinking not of themselves , 
but of a people which unshed to be done with classes and 
special interests and the authority of men whom they 
had not themselves chosen to rule over them. 

They were consciously planning that men of every 
class should be free, and America a place to which men 
out of every nation might resort who wished to share 
with them the rights and privileges of free men. And 
we take our cue from them , do we not? We intend what 
they intended. 

We here in America believe our participation in this 
present war to be only the fruitage of what they planted. 
Our case differs from theirs only in this, that it is our 
inestimable privilege to concert with men out of every 
nation what shall make not only the liberties of America 
secure, but the liberties of every other people as tvell. 

There must now be settled, once for all, what was 
settled for America in the great age upon whose inspira- 
tion we draw today. This is surely a fitting place from 
which calmly to look out upon our task. And this is 
the appropriate place from which to avow, alike to the 
friends who look on and to the friends with whom we 
have the happiness to be associated in action, the faith 
and purpose with which we act . This, then, is our con- 
ception of the great struggle in which we are engaged. 

The plot is MTitten plain upon every scene and every 
81 



act of the supreme tragedy. On the one hand stand the 
peoples of the world — not only the peoples actually 
engaged, but many others also who suffer under mastery 
but cannot act; peoples of many races and in every part 
of the world — the people of stricken Russia still among 
the rest, though they are for the moment unorganized 
and helpless. 

Opposed to them, masters of many armies, stands an 
isolated friendless group of governments, who speak 
no common purpose, but only selfish ambitions of their 
own by which none can profat but themselves, and whose 
people are fuel in their hands; governments which fear 
their people and yet are for the time their sovereign 
lords, making every choice for them and disposing of 
their lives and fortunes as they will, as well as of the 
lives and fortunes of every people who fall under their 
power — governments clothed with the strange trap- 
pings and the primitive authority of an age that is 
altogether alien and hostile to our own. 

The past and the present are in deadly grapple, and 
the peoples of the world are being done to death between 
them. There can be but one issue. 

The settlement must be final. There can be no com- 
promise. No half-way decision would be tolerable. 
No half-way decision is conceivable. 

These are the ends for which the associated 'peoples of 
the world are fighting, and which must be conceded them 
before there can be peace: 

First, the destruction of every arbitrary power any- 
where that can separately, secretly and of its siiigle 
choice disturb the peace of the world, or, if it cannot be 

82 



presently destroyed, at the least its reduction to virtual 
impotence. 

Second, the settlement of every question, whether of 
territory or sovereignty, of economic arrangement or of 
political relationship, upon the basis of the free accept- 
ance of that settlement by the people immediately con- 
cerned, and not upon the basis of the material interest or 
advantage of any other nation or people which may de- 
sire a different settlement for the sake of its oum exterior 
influence or mastery. 

Third, the consent of all nations to be governed in their 
conduct towards each other by the same principles of 
honor and of respect for the common law of civilized 
society that govern the individual citizens of all modern 
states and in their relations vyith one another, to the end 
that all promises and covenants may be sacredly observed, 
no private plots or conspiracies hatched, no selfish in- 
juries wrought with impunity, and a mutual trust estab- 
lished upon the handsome foundation of a mutual respect 
for right. 

Fourth, the establishment of an organization of peace 
which shall make it certain that the combined power of 
free nations will check every invasion of right, and serve 
to make peace and justice the more secure by affording a 
definite tribunal of opinion to which all must submit, 
and by which every international readjustment that can- 
not be amicably agreed upon by the peoples directly con- 
cerned shall be sanctioned. 

These great objects can be put into a single sentence — 

What xoe seek is the reign of law based upon the consev t 
83 



of the governed and sustained by the organized ojnnion of 
mankind. 

These great ends can be realized only by the de- 
termination of what the thinking peoples of the world 
desire, with their longing hope for justice and for social 
freedom and opportunity. 

I can fancy that the air of this place carries the 
accents of such principles with a peculiar kindness. 
Here were started forces which the great nation against 
which they were primarily directed at first regarded as 
a revolt against its rightful authority, but which it has 
long since seen to have been a step in the liberation of 
its own people as well as of the people of the United 
States. And I stand here to speak — speak proudly and 
with confident hope of the spread of this revolt, this 
liberation, to the great stage of the world itself. 

The blinded rulers of Prussia have aroused forces 
they knew little of, forces which once roused can never 
be crushed to earth again, for they have at their heart 
an inspiration and a purpose which are deathless and 
of the very stuff of triumph. 



XI. THE ISSUES OF THE WAR 

(From Speech at the Opening of the Third Liberty Loan 
Campaign, New York, September 27, 1918.) 

At every turn of the war we gain a fresh conscious- 
ness of what we mean to accompUsh by it. When our 
hope and expectation are most excited we think more 
definitely than before of the issues that hang upon it 
and of the purposes which must be reahzed by means 
of it. For it has positive and well-defined purposes 
which we did not determine and which we cannot alter. 
No statesman or assembly created them; no statesman 
or assembly can alter them. They have arisen out of 
the very nature and circumstances of the war. The 
most that statesmen or assemblies can do is to carry 
them out or be false to them. They were perhaps not 
clear at the outset; but they are clear now. The war 
has lasted more than four years and the whole world 
has been drawn into it. The common will of mankind 
has been substituted for the particular purposes of in- 
dividual states. Individual statesmen may have 
started the conflict, but neither they nor their opponents 
can stop it as they please. It has become a peoples' 
war, and peoples of all sorts and races, of every degree 
of power and variety of fortune, are involved in its 
sweeping processes of change and settlement. We came 
into it when its character had become fully defined and 
it was plain that no action could stand apart or be 
indifferent to its outcome. Its challenge drove to the 
heart of everything we cared for and lived for. The 

85 



voice of the war had become clear and gripped our 
hearts. Our brothers from many lands, as well as 
our own murdered dead under the sea, were calling to 
us, and we responded, fiercely and of course. 

The air was clear about us. We saw things in their 
full, convincing proportions as they were; and we have 
seen them with steady eyes and unchanging compre- 
hension ever since. We accepted the issues of the war 
as facts, not as any group of men either here or else- 
where had defined them, and we can accept no out- 
come which does not squarely meet and settle them. 
Those issues are these: 

Shall the military power of any nation or group of 
nations he suffered to determine the fortunes of peoples 
over whom they have no right to rule except the right of 
force? 

Shall strong nations be free to icrong ireak nations and 
make them subject to their purpose and interest? 

Shall peoples he ruled and dominated, even in their oicn 
internal affairs, by arbitrary and irresponsible force 
or by their own will and choice? 

Shall there he a common standard of right and privilege 
for all peoples and nations, or shall the strong do as they 
will and the weak suffer without redress? 

Shall the assertion of right he haphazard ojid by casual 
alliance or shall there be a common concert to oblige the 
observance of common rights? 

No man, no group of men, chose these to he the issues 
of the struggle. They are the issues of it; and they mu^t 
be settled — by no arrangement or compromise or adjust- 
ment of interests, hut definitely and once for all and with 
a full and unequivocal acceptance of the principle that 



the interest of the weakest is as sacred as the interest of the 
strongest. 

This is what we mean when we speak of a per- 
manent peace, if we speak sincerely, intelligently, and 
with a real knowledge and comprehension of the matter 
we deal with. . , . 

But these general terms do not disclose the whole 
matter. Some details are needed to make them sound 
less like a thesis and more like a practical program. 
These, then, are some of the particulars, and I state 
them with the greater confidence because I can state 
them authoritatively as representing this Government's 
interpretation of its own duty with regard to peace: 

1. The impartial justice meted out must involve no 
discrimination between those to whom we wish to be 
just and those to whom we do not wish to be just. It 
must be a justice that plays no favorites and knows no 
standard but the equal rights of the several peoples 
concerned. 

2. No special or separate interest of any single 
nation or any group of nations can be made the basis of 
any part of the settlement which is not consistent with 
the common interest of all . 

3. There can be no league or alliances or special 
covenants and understandings within the general and 
common family of the League of Nations. 

4. x4nd more specifically, there can be no special, 
selfish economic combination within the league and no 
employment of any form of economic boycott or ex- 
clusion except as the power of economic penalty by ex- 
clusion from the markets of the world may be vested in 

87 



the League of Nations itself as a means of discipline 
and control. 

5 . All international agreements and treaties of every 
kind must be made known in their entirety to the rest 
of the world. 

Special alliances and economic rivalries and hostilities 
have been the prolific source in the modern world of 
the plans and passions that produce war. It would be 
an insincere as well as an insecure peace that did not 
exclude them in definite and binding terms. . . , 

The confidence with which I venture to speak for 
our people in these matters does not spring from our 
traditions merely, and the well-known principles of 
international action which we have always professed 
and followed. In the same sentence in uhich I say thai 
the United States vyill enter into no special arrangements 
or understandings loith particular nations let me say also 
that the United States is prepared to assume its full share 
of responsibility for the maintenance of the common 
covenants and understandings upon uhich peace must 
henceforth rest. We still read Washington's immortal warn- 
ing against '^entangling alliances" unth full comprehen- 
sion and an answering purpose. But only special and 
limited alliances entangle; arid we recognize and accept 
the duty of a new day in which we are permitted to 
hope for a general alliance which will avoid entangle- 
ments and clear the air of the world for common under- 
standings and the maintenance of common rights. 



XII. THE MEANING OF THE VICTORY 
WON 

(Address delivered before Congress in Joint Session 

on November 11, 1918, announcing the Signing of 

Terms of Armistice by Representatives of the German 

Government.) 

[On October 5, 1918, the German Government requested 
the President of the United States "to take in hand the 
restoration of peace and inform all the belligerent states 
of this request," and declared its acceptance of "the 
'program set forth by the President in his message to 
Congress on January 8 and in his later pronouncements, 
especially his speech on September 27, as a basis for 
peace negotiations.'^ Before transmitting the German 
request for an armistice to the Allied Governments, the 
President demanded further assurances of the German 
Government that it unequivocally accepted the terms laid 
down in his address of January 8 and "any subsequent 
addresses," not as a basis for negotiation, but as actual 
terms of peace; and that this wish and purpose emanated 
"not from those who had hitherto dictated German policy 
and conducted the present war on Germany's behalf, but 
from Ministers who spoke for the majority of the Reichstag 
and for an overwhelming majority of the German people." 
After several diplomatic notes had been interchanged, the 
President became so far satisfied upon these points that 
on October 23, he consented "to take up with the govern- 
ments with which the Government of the United States is 
associated the question of an armistice." He added, 
hovxver, that "the only armistice which he would feel 

89 



justified in submittiJig for consideration would he one 
which should leave the United States and the -powers asso- 
ciated with her in a fosition to enforce any arrangements 
that may be entered into and to make a renewal of hostilities 
on the part of Germany impossible." 

The European Allies, after careful consideration of 
this correspondence between the American and German 
Governments, announced on November 5 "their vyillingness 
to make peace with the Government of Germany on the 
terms of peace laid down in the President's address to 
Congress of January, 1918, and the principles of settle- 
ment enunciated in his subsequent addresses" The Allied 
Governments, however, added to this definite and formal 
acceptance of President Wilson s peace program one 
explanatory clause and one reservation. {1) With respect 
to the seventh and eighth of the "Fourteen Points" — those 
relating to the evacuation and restoration of invaded 
territory — the Allies declared that they understood these 
clauses to mean "that compensation will he made by 
Germany for all damage done to the civilian population 
of the Allies and their property by the aggression of Ger- 
many by land, by sea, and from the air." President 
Wilson at once gave assurance of his agreement icith this 
interpretation of the clauses in question . (5) With respect 
to the second of the "Fourteen Points," that concerning 
freedom of navigation of the high seas, the Allies pointed 
out that "what is usually described as the freedom of the 
seas is open to various interpretations, some of zchich they 
could not accept." They therefore reserved to themselves 
"complete freedom on this subject when they enter the peace 
conference." It is important to note that the freedom of 
the seas "alike in peace and in war," demanded by the 

90 



President in his address of January 8 was not at all the 
kind of freedom which some German writers and officials 
have claimed; for it loas clearly conditioned upon the prior 
establishment of a League of Nations which should have 
the power to deny the "freedom of the seas" to nations 
which violate their covenants — including the covenant by 
which the League itself should be established. As an 
English icriter has expressed it, the full meaning of 
President Wilson s claiise coyicerning freedom of naviga- 
tion , when taken in its context as a part of his entire 
peace plan, may best be expressed as follows: 

" The League of Nations will collectively use the rights 
of embargo and capture at sea for the enforcement of its 
covenants against any Power ivkich violates them, but 
the right to interfere with innocent cargoes at sea is 
denied to a Power which wages war without the sanction 
of the League. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the 
seas outside territorial waters is assured in peace." 

Since both the German and Allied Goveriiments had 
indicated their willingness to make peace upon the terms 
outlined in President Wilson's addresses and his notes 
to the German Government, it only remained to determine 
the terms of armistice pending the convening of a peace 
conference. These terms, fixed by Marshal Foch after 
consultation with the military and naval authorities of 
the Allied Governments and of the United States, were 
immediately accepted by Germany. The armistice was 
signed at 6 o'clock A.M. {Washington time; 11 A.M. 
French time), November 11, 1918; and at one o'clock 
P.M. of the same day President Wilson appeared before 
the two Houses of Congress assembled in Joint Session 
and delivered the following address.] 

91 



Gentlemen of the Congress: 

In these times of rapid and stupendous change it 
will in some degree lighten my sense of responsibility 
to perform in person the duty of communicating to you 
some of the larger circiunstances of the situation with 
which it is necessary to deal. 

The German authorities, who have at the invitation 
of the Supreme War Coimcil been in communication 
with Marshal Foch, have accepted and signed the 
terms of armistice which he was authorized and in- 
structed to communicate to them. 

Here Hie President read the terms of the armistice. 

The war thus comes to an end; for having accepted 
these terms of armistice, it will be impossible for the 
German command to renew it. 

It is not now possible to assess the consequences of this 
great consummation. We know only that this tragical 
war, whose consuming flames swept from one nation to 
another until all the world was on fire, is at an end , and 
that it was the privilege of our own people to enter it 
at its most critical juncture in such fashion and in such 
force as to contribute, in a way of which we are all 
deeply proud, to the great result. 

We know, too, that the object of the war is attained; 
the object upon which all free men had set their hearts; 
and attained with a sweeping completeness, which even 
now we do not realize. 

Armed imperialism, such as the men conceived who 
were but yesterday the masters of Germany, is at an 
end, its illicit ambitions engulfed in black disaster. 
Who will now seek to revive it? The arbitrary power of 

92 



the military caste of Germany, which once could se- 
cretly and of its own single choice disturb the peace of 
the world, is discredited and destroyed. 

And more than that — much more than that — has been 
accomplished. The great nations which associated them- 
selves to destroy it have now definitely united in the com- 
mon 'purpose to set up such a peace as will satisfy the 
longing of the whole world for disinterested justice, em- 
bodied in settlements which are based upon something 
much better and more lasting than the selfish competitive 
interests of powerful states. There is no longer conjecture 
as to the objects the victors have in mind. They have 
a mind in the matter, not only, but a heart also. Their 
avowed and concerted purpose is to satisfy and protect the 
weak as well as to accord their just rights to the strong. 

The humane temper and intention of the victorious 
governments have already been manifested in a very 
practical way. Their representatives in the Supreme 
War Council at Versailles have by unanimous resolution 
assured the peoples of the Central Empires that every- 
thing that is possible in the circumstances will be done 
to supply them with food and relieve the distressing 
want that is in so many places threatening their very 
lives; and steps are to be taken immediately to organize 
these efforts at relief in the same systematic manner that 
they were organized in the case of Belgium. 

By the use of the idle tonnage of the Central Empires 
it ought presently to be possible to lift the fear of utter 
misery from their oppressed populations and set their 
minds and energies free for the great and hazardous 
tasks of political reconstruction which now face them 
on every hand. Hunger does not breed reform; it 

93 



breeds madness aud all the ugly distempers that make 
an ordered life impossible. 

For with the fall of the ancient governments which 
rested like an incubus on the peoples of the Central 
Empires has come political change not merely, but 
revolution; and revolution which seems as yet to assume 
no final and ordered form but to run from one fluid 
change to another, until thoughtful men are forced to 
ask themselves with what governments and of what 
sort are we about to deal in the making of the covenants 
of peace. With what authority will they meet us, and 
with what assurance that their authority will abide and 
sustain securely the international arrangements into 
which we are about to enter.? 

There is here matter for no small anxiety and mis- 
giving. When peace is made, upon whose promises and 
engagements besides our own is it to rest? 

Let us be perfectly frank with ourselves and admit 
that these questions cannot be satisfactorily answered 
now or at once. But the moral is not that there is little 
hope of any early answer that will suffice. It is only 
that we must be patient and helpful and mindful above 
all of the great hope and confidence that lie at the heart 
of what is taking place. 

Excesses accoviplish nothing. Unhappy Russia has 
furnished abundant recent proof of that. Disorder im- 
mediately defeats itself. If excesses should occur, if 
disorder shoidd for a time raise its head, a sober second 
thought will follow and a day of constructive action, if we 
help and do not hinder. 

The present and all that it holds belongs to the nations 
and the peoples who preserved their self-control and the 

94 



orderly processes of their governments; the future to those 
who prove themselves the true friends of mankind. To 
conquer with arms is to make only a temporary con- 
quest; to conquer the world by earning its esteem is to 
make permanent conquest. 

I am confident that the nations that have learned the 
discipline of freedom and that have settled with self- 
possession to its ordered practice are now about to make 
conquest of the world by the sheer power of example 
and of friendly helpfulness. 

The peoples who have but just come out from under the 
yoke of arbitrary government and who are now coming at 
last into their freedom will never find the treasures of liberty 
they are in search of if they look for them by the light of 
the torch. They will find that every pathway that is stained 
with the blood of their own brothers leads to the wilderness, 
not to the seat of their hope. 

They are now face to face with their initial test. We must 
hold the light steady until they find themselves. And in 
the meantime, if it be possible, we must establish a peace 
that will justly define their place among the nations, 
remove all fear of their neighbors and of their former mas- 
ters and enable them to live in security and contentment 
when they have set their ovm affairs in order. 

I, for one, do not doubt their purpose or their capa- 
city. There are some happy signs that they know and 
will choose the way of self-control and peaceful accom- 
modation. If they do, we shall put our aid at their 
disposal in every w^ay that we can. If they do not, we 
must await with patience and sympathy the awakening 
and recovery that will assuredly come at last. 



95 



Xin. THE MANDATE OF HUMANITY 

(From Speech at Manchester, England, December 
30, 1918) 

When we analyze the present situation and the 
future that we now have to mold and control, it seems 
to me there is no other thought than that that can 
guide us. You know that the United States has al- 
ways felt from the very beginning of her story that she 
must keep herself separate from any kind of connection 
with European politics. I want to say very frankly to 
you that she is not now interested in European politics, 
but »she is interested in the partnership of right between 
America and Europe. If the futiue had nothing for us 
but a new attempt to keep the world at a right poise 
by a balance of power the United States would take no 
interest, because she will join no .combination of power 
which is not a combination of all of us. She is not 
interested merely in the peace of Europe, but in the 
peace of the world. . . . 

There is a great voice of humanity abroad in the 
world just now which he who cannot hear is deaf. 
There is a great compulsion of the common conscience 
now in existence which if any statesman resist, will 
gain for him the most unenviable eminence in history. 
We are not obeying the mandate of parties or of 
politics. We are obeying the mandate of humanity. 



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